THE 



EECKEATIONS 



OF A 



COUNTRY PARSON. 

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6 CM oL (XvvoLhjtA^ J L. H J^XoXvi/:^^- 

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BOSTON: 
TICKNOR AND FIELDS 

M DCCC LXI. 



TK '^i^'' 

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RIVERSIDE PRESS: 

PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON. 

CAMBRIDGE, 

OBERLiN COL. LJ^* 



DEC 2 6 1914 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 
CONCERNING THE COUNTRY PARSON^S LIFE .... 5 



CHAPTER II. 
CONCERNING THE ART OF PUTTING THINGS ; BEING 
THOUGHTS ON REPRESENTATION AND MISREPRE- 
SENTATION 23 

CHAPTER III. 

CONCERNING TWO BLISTERS OF HUMANITY ; BEING 
THOUGHTS ON PETTY MALIGNITY AND PETTY 
TRICKERY 63 

CHAPTER IV. 
CONCERNING WORK AND PLAY 101 

CHAPTER V. 
CONCERNING COUNTRY HOUSES AND COUNTRY LIFE . 131 

CHAPTER VI. 
CONCERNING TIDINESS ; BEING THOUGHTS UPON AN 

OVERLOOKED SOURCE OF HUMAN CONTENT . . . 169 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

CHAPTER VII. 

HOW I MUSED IN THE RAILWAY TRAIN ; BEING 
THOUGHTS ON RISING BY CANDLE-LIGHT ; ON NER- 
VOUS FEARS ; AND ON VAPOURING 202 

CHAPTER VIII. 
CONCERNING THE MORAL INFLUENCES OF THE DWELL- 
ING 233 

CHAPTER IX. 
CONCERNING HURRY AND LEISURE 265 

CHAPTER X. 
CONCERNING THE WORRIES OF LIFE, AND HOW TO 

MEET THEM 307 

CHAPTER XI. 
CONCERNING GIVING UP AND COMING DOWN .... 342 



CHAPTER XII. 
CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS 378 

CHAPTER Xm. 
CONCERNING GROWING OLD 406 



CONCLUSION 439 



CHAPTER I. 
CONCERNING THE COUNTRY PARSON'S LIFE. 




IIIS is Monday morning. It is a beautiful 
sunshiny morning early in July. I am 
\^:j sitting on the steps that lead to my door, 
somewhat tired by the duty of yesterday, 
but feeling very restful and thankful. Before me 
there is a little expanse of the brightest grass, too 
little to be called a lawn, very soft and mossy, and very 
carefully mown. It is shaded by three noble beeches, 
about two hundred years old. The sunshine around has 
a green tinge from the reflection of the leaves. Double 
hedges, thick and tall, the inner one of gleaming beech, 
shut out all sight of a country lane that runs hard by : a 
lane into which this gravelled sweep of would-be avenue 
enters, after winding deftly through evergreens, rich and 
old, so as to make the utmost of its little length. On the 
side furthest from the lane, the miniature lawn opens into 
a garden of no great extent, and beyond the garden you 
see a green field sloping upwards to a wood \vhich bounds 
the view. One half of the front of the house is covered 
to the roof by a climbing rose-tree, so rich now with clus- 
ter roses that you see only the white soft masses of fra- 
grance. Crimson roses and fuchsias cover half-way up 



6 COXCERNING THE 

the remainder of the front wall ; and the sides of the 
flight of steps are green with large-leaved ivy. If ever 
there was a dweUing embosomed in great trees and ever- 
greens, it is here. Everything grows beautifully : oaks, 
horse-chestnuts, beeches ; laurels, yews, hollies ; lilacs 
and hawthorn trees. Off a little way on the right, grace- 
ful in stem, in branches, in the pale bark, in the light-green 
leaves, I see my especial pet, a fair acacia. This is the 
true country ; not the poor shadow of it which you have 
near great and smoky towns. That sapphire air is polluted 
by no factory chimney. Smoke is a beauty here, there is 
so little of it : rising thin and blue from the cottage ; hos- 
pitable and friendly-looking from the rare mansion. The 
town is five miles distant : there is not even a village 
near. Green fields are all about : hawthorn hedges and 
rich hedge-rows : great masses of wood everywhere. 
But this is Scotland : and there is no lack of hills and 
rocks, of little streams and waterfalls ; and two hundred 
yards off, winding round that churchyard whose white 
stones you see by glimpses through old oak branches, a 
large river glides swiftly by. 

It is a quiet and beautiful scene ; and it pleases me to 
think that Britain has thousands and thousands like it. 
But of course none, in my mind, equal this : for this has 
been my home for five years. 

I have been sitting here for an hour, with a book on ray 
knee ; and upon that a piece of paper, whereon I have 
been noting down some thoughts for the sermon which I 
hope to write during this week, and to preach next Sun- 
day in that little parish-church of which you can see a 
corner of a gable through the oaks which surround the 
churchyard. I have not been able to think very con- 
nectedly, indeed : for two little feet have been pattering 



COUNTRY PARSON'S LIFE. 7 

round me, two little hands pulling at me occasionally, and 
a little voice entreating that I should come and have a 
race upon the green. Of course I went : for like most 
men who are not very great or very bad, I have learned, 
for the sake of the little owner of the hands and the voice, 
to love every little child. Several times, too, I have been 
obliged to get up and make a dash at a very small weed 
which I discerned just appearing through the gravel ; 
and once or twice my man-servant has come to consult 
me about matters connected with the garden and the 
stable. My sermon will be the better for all these inter- 
ruptions. I do not mean to say that it will be absolutely 
good, though it w^ill be as good as I can make it : but it 
will be better for the races with my little girl, and for the 
thoughts about my horse, than it would have been if I 
had not been interrupted at all. The Roman Catholic 
Church meant it well : but it was far mistaken when it 
thought to make a man a better parish priest by cut- 
ting him off from domestic ties, and quite emancipating 
him from all the little worries of domestic life. That 
might be the way to get men who w^ould preach an 
unpractical religion, not human in interest, not able to 
comfort, direct, sustain through daily cares, temptations, 
and sorrows. But for preaching which will come home to 
men's business and bosoms ; which will not appear to 
ignore those things which must of necessity occupy the 
greatest part of an ordinary mortal's thoughts ; commend 
me to the preacher who has learned by experience what 
are human ties, and what is human worry. 

It is a characteristic of country life, that living in the 
country you have so many cares outside. In town, you 
have nothing to think of (I mean in the way of little ma- 
terial matters) beyond the walls of your dwelling. It is not 



8 CONCERNING THE 

your business to see to the paving of the street before 
your door ; and if you Hve in a square, you are not indi- 
vidually responsible for the tidiness of the shrubbery in 
its centre. When you come home, after the absence of a 
week or a month, you have nothing to look round upon 
and see that it is right. The space within the house's 
walls is not a man's proper province. Your library table 
and your books are all the domain which comes within the 
scope of your orderly spirit. But if you live in the 
country, in a house of your own with even a few acres 
of land attached to it, you have a host of things to think 
of when you come home from your week's or month's 
absence: you have an endless number of little things 
worrying you to take a turn round and see that they are 
all as they should be. Yo*i can hardly sit down and rest 
for their tugging at you. Is the grass all trimly mown ? 
Has the pruning been done that you ordered ? Has that 
rose-tree been trained? Has that bit of fence been 
mended ? Are all the walks perfectly free from weeds ? 
Is there not a gap left in box-wood edgings? and are 
the edges of all walks through grass sharp and clearly 
defined ? Has that nettly corner of a field been made 
tidy? Has any one been steahng the fruit? Have the 
neighbouring cows been in your clover ? How about the 
stable ? — any fractures of the harness ? — any scratches 
on the carriage ? — anything amiss with the horse or 
horses? All these, and innumerable questions more, 
press on the man who looks after matters for himself, 
when he arrives at home. 

Still, there is good in all this. That which in a dis- 
ponding mood you call a worry, in a cheerful mood you 
think a source of simple, healthful interest in life. And 
there is one case in particular, in which I doubt not the 



COUNTRY PARSON'S LIFE. 9 

reader of simple and natural tastes (and such may all 
my readers be) has experienced, if he be a country parson 
not too rich or great, the benefit of these gentle counter- 
irritants. It is when you come home, leaving your wife 
and children for a little while behind you. It is autumn: 
you are having your holiday : you have all gone to the 
sea-side. You have been away two or three weeks ; and 
you begin to think that you ought to let your parishioners 
see that you have not forgotten them. You resolve to go 
home for ten days, which shall include two Sundays with 
their duty. You have to travel a hundred and thirty 
miles. So on a Friday morning you bid your little cir- 
cle good-bye, and set off alone. It is not, perhaps, an 
extreme assumption that you are a man of sound sense 
and feeling, and not a selfish, conceited humbug: and, 
the case being so, you are not ashamed to confess that 
you are somewhat saddened by even that short parting ; 
and that various thoughts obtrude themselves of possible 
accident and sorrow before you meet again. It is only 
ten days, indeed : but a wuse man is recorded to have once 
advised his fellow-men in words which run as follows, 
' Boast not thyself of to-morrow, for thou knowest not 
what a day may bring forth.' And as you sail along in 
the steamer, and sweep along in the train, you are thinking 
of the little things that not without tears bade their gov- 
ernor farewell. It was early morning when you left : 
and as you proceed on your solitary journey, the sun as- 
cends to noon, and declines tow^ards evening. You have 
read your newspaper : there is no one else in that com- 
partment of the carriage : and hour after hour you grow 
more and more dull and downhearted. At length, as the 
sunset is gilding the swept harvest-fields, you reach the 
quiet little railway station among the hills. It is wonder- 



10 CONCERNING THE 

fill to see it. There is no village : hardly a dwelling in 
sight : there are rocky hills all round ; great trees ; and 
a fine river, by following which the astute engineer led 
his railway to this seemingly inaccessible spot. You 
alight on that primitive platform, with several large trees 
growing out of it, and w^ith a waterfall at one end of it : 
and beyond the little palisade, you see your trap (let me 
not say carriage), your man-servant, your horse, perhaps 
your pair. How kindly and pleasant the expression even 
of the horse's back ! How unlike the bustle of a railway 
station in a large town ! The train goes, the brass of the 
engine red in the sunset ; and you are left in perfect 
stillness. Your baggage is stowed, and you drive away 
gently. It takes some piloting to get down the steep 
slope from this out-of-the-way place. What a change 
from the thunder of the train to this audible quiet ! You 
interrogate your servant first in the comprehensive 
question, if all is right. Relieved by his general afiirm- 
ative answer, you descend into particulars. Any one 
sick in the parish ? how was the church attended on the 
Sundays you were away ? hoAV is Jenny, who had the 
fever ; and John, who had the paralytic stroke ? How 
are the servants ? how is the horse; the cow; the pig; 
the dog ? How is the garden progressing ? how about 
fruit ; how about flowers ? There was an awful thun- 
derstorm on Wednesday : the people thought it was the 
end of the world. Two bullocks were killed : and 
thirteen sheep. Widow Wiggins' son had deserted from 
the army, and had come home. The harvest-home at 
such a farm is to-night : may Thomas go ? What a 
little quiet world is the country parish : what a micro- 
cosm even the country parsonage ! You are interested 
and pleased : you are getting over your stupid feeling of 



COUNTRY PARSON'S LWK. 11 

depression. You are interested in all these little mat- 
ters, not because you have grown a gossiping, little- 
minded man ; but because you know it is fit and right 
and good for you to be interested in such things. You 
have five or six miles to 'drive : never less : the scene 
grows always more homely and familiar as you draw 
nearer home. And arrived at last, what a deal to look 
at! What a welcome on the servants' faces; such a 
contrast to the indifferent looks of servants in a town. 
You hasten to your library-table to see what letters 
await you : country folks are alw^ays a little nervous 
about their letters, as half expecting, half fearing, half 
hoping, some vague, great, undefined event. You see 
the snug fire : the chamber so precisely arranged, and 
so fresh-looking : you remark it and value it fifty times 
more amid country fields and trees than you would 
turning out of the manifest life and civilization of the 
city street. You are grow-ing cheerful and thankful 
now ; but before it grows dark, you must look round out 
of doors : and that makes you entirely thankful and 
cheerful. vSurely the place has grown greener and 
prettier since you saw it last ! You walk about the 
garden and the shrubbery : the gravel is right, the grass 
is right, the trees are right, the hedges are right, every- 
thing is right. You go to the stable-yard : you pat your 
horse, and pull his ears, and enjoy seeing his snug 
resting-place for the night. You peep into the cow- 
house, now growing very dark : you glance into the 
abode of the pig: the dog has been capering about you 
all this while. You are not too great a man to take 
pleasure in these little things. And now when you 
enter your library again, where your solitary meal is 
spread, you sit down in the mellow lamplight, and feel 



12 CONCERNING THE 

quite happy. How different it would have been to have 
walked out of a street-cab into a town-house, with 
nothing beyond its walls to think of"! 

This is so sunshiny a day, and everything is looking 
so cheerful and beautiful, that I know my present 
testimony to the happiness of the country parson's life 
m.ust be received with considerable reservation. Just 
at the present hour, I am willing to declare that I 
think the life of a country clergyman, in a pretty 
parish, with a well-conducted and well-to-do population, 
and with a fair living, is as happy, useful, and honour- 
able as the life of man can be. Your work is all of a 
pleasant kind ; you have, generally speaking, not too 
much of it ; the fault is your own if you do not meet 
much esteem and regard among your parishioners of 
all degrees ; you feel you are of some service in your 
generation : you have intellectual labours and tastes 
which keep your mind from growing rusty, and which 
admit you into a wide field of pure enjoyment : you 
have pleasant country cares to divert your mind from 
head-work, and to keep you for hours daily in the open 
air, in a state of pleasurable interest ; your little chil- 
dren grow up with green fields about them and pure 
air to breathe : and if your heart be in your sacred 
work, you feel, Sunday by Sunday and day by day, a 
solid enjoyment in telling your fellow-creatures the 
Good News you are commissioned to address to them, 
which it is hard to describe to another, but which you 
humbly and thankfully take and keep. You have not, 
indeed, the excitement and the exhilaration of command- 
ing the attention of a large educated congregation : 
those are reserved for the popular clergyman of a 



COUNTRY PARSON'S LIFE. 13 

city parish. But then, you are free from the tempta- 
tion to attempt the unworthy arts of the clap-trap mob- 
orator, or to preach mainly to display 3'our own talents 
and eloquence ; you have striven to exclude all personal 
ambition ; and, forgetting yourself or what people may 
think of yourself, to preach simply for the good of your 
fellow-sinners, and for the glory of that kind Master 
whom you serve. And around you there are none 
of those heart-breaking things which must crush the 
earnest clergyman in a large town : no destitution ; 
poverty, indeed, but no starvation : and, although evil 
will be wherever man is, nothing of the gross, daring, 
shocking vice, which is matured in the dens of the 
great city. The cottage children breathe a confined 
atmosphere while within the cottage ; but they have 
only to go to the door, and the pure air of heaven is 
about them, and they live in it most of their waking 
hours. Very different with the pale children of a like 
class in the city, who do but exchange the infected 
chamber for the filthy lane, and whose eyes are hardly 
ever gladdened by the sight of a green field. And when 
the diligent country parson walks or drives about his 
parish, not without a decided feehng of authority and 
ownership, he knows every man, woman, and child he 
meets, and all their concerns and cares. Still, even on 
this charming morning I do not forget, that it depends 
a good deal upon the parson's present mood, what sort 
of account he may give of his country parish and his 
parochial life. If he have been recently cheated by a 
well-to-do farmer in the price of some farm produce; 
if he have seen a humble neighbour deliberately forcing 
his cow through a weak part of the hedge into a rich 
pasture-field of the glebe, and then have found him 



14 CONCERNING THE 

ready to swear that the cow trespassed entirely without 
his knowledge or will ; if he meet a hulking fellow 
carrying in the twilight various rails from a fence to be 
used as firewood ; if, on a warm summer day, the whole 
congregation falls fast asleep during the sermon ; if a 
farmer tells him what a bad and dishonest man a dis- 
charged man-servant was, some weeks after the parson 
had found that out for himself and packed off the 
dishonest man ; if certain of the cottagers near appear 
disposed to live entirely, instead of only partially, of the 
parsonage larder ; the poor parson may sometimes be 
found ready to wish himself in town, compact within a 
house in a street with no back door ; and not spreading 
out such a surface as in the country he must, for petty 
fraud and peculation. But, after all, the country par- 
son's great worldly cross lies for the most part in his 
poverty, and in the cares which arise out of that. It 
is not always so, indeed. In the lot of some the happy 
medium has been reached; they have found the 'neither 
poverty nor riches' of the wise man's prayer. Would 
that it were so with all ! For how it must cripple a 
clergyman's usefulness, how abate his energies, how 
destroy his eloquence, how sicken his heart, how narrow 
and degrade his mind, how tempt (as it has sometimes 
done), to unfair and dishonest shifts and expedients, to 
go about not knowing how to make the ends meet, not 
seeing how to pay what he owes ! If I were a rich 
man, how it would gladden me to send a fifty-pound note 
to certain houses I have seen ! What a dead weight it 
would lift from the poor wife's heart ! Ah ! I can think 
of the country parson, like poor Sydney Smith, adding 
his accounts, calculating his little means, wondering 
where he can pinch or pare any closer, till the poor 



COUNTRY PARSON'S LIFE. 15 

fellow bends down his stupified head and throbbing 
temples on his hands, and wishes he could creep into a 
quiet grave, God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb ; 
or I should wonder how it does not drive some country 
parsons mad, to think what would become of their 
children if they were taken away. It is the warm nest 
upon the rotten bough. They need abundant faith ; let 
us trust they get it. But in a desponding mood, I can 
well imagine such a one resolving that no child of his 
shall ever enter upon a course in life which has brought 
himself such misery as he has known. 

I have been writing down some thoughts, as I have 
said, for the sermon of next Sunday. To-morrow 
morning I shall begin to write it fully out. Some 
individuals, I am aware, have maintained that listening 
to a sermon is irksome work ; but to a man whose tastes 
lie in that way, the writing of sermons is most pleasant 
occupation. It does you good. Unless you are a mere 
false pretender, you cannot try to impress any truth 
forcibly upon the hearts of others, without impressing it 
forcibly upon your own. All that you will ever make 
other men feel, will be only a subdued reflection of what 
you yourself have felt. And sermon-writing is a task 
that is divided into many stages. You begin afresh 
every week : you come to an end every week. If you 
are writing a book, the end appears very far away. 
If you find that although you do your best, you yet 
treat spme part of your subject badly, you know that the 
bad passage remains as a permanent blot : and you 
work on under the cross-influence of that recollection. 
But if, with all your pains, this week's sermon is poor, 
why, you hope to do better next week. You seek a 
fresh field : you try again. No doubt, in preaching 



16 CONCERNING THE 

your sermons you are somewhat annoyed by rustic 
boorishness and want of thought. Various bumpkins 
will forget to close the door behind them when they 
enter church too late, as they not unfrequently do. 
Various men with great hob-nailed shoes, entering late, 
instead of quietly slipping into a pew close to the door, 
will stamp noisily up the passage to the further extrem- 
ity of the church. Various faces will look up at you 
week by week, hopelessly blank of all interest or intelli- 
gence. Some human beings will not merely sleep, but 
loudly evince that they are sleeping. Well, you gradually 
cease to be worried by these little things. At first, they 
jarred through every nerve ; but you grow accustomed 
to them. And if you be a man of principle and of sense, 
you know better than to fancy that amid a rustic people 
your powers are thrown away. Even if you have in 
past days been able to interest congregations of the 
refined and cultivated class, you will now show your 
talent and your principle at once by accommodating your 
instructions to the comprehension of the simple souls 
committed to your care. I confess I have no patience 
with men who profess to preach sermons carelessly 
prepared, because they have an uneducated congrega- 
tion. Nowhere is more careful preparation needed ; but 
of course it must be preparation of the right sort. Let 
it be received as an axiom, that the very first aim of the 
preacher should be to interest. He must interest, before 
he can hope to instruct or improve. And no matter how 
filled with orthodox doctrine and good advice a sermon 
may be: if it put the congregation to sleep, it is an 
abominably bad sermon. 

Surely, I go on to think, this kind of life must affect 
all the productions of the mind of the man who leads it. 



COUNTRY PARSON'S LIFE. 17 

There must be a smack of the country, its scenes and its 
cares, about them all. You walk in shady lanes : you 
stand and look at the rugged bark of old trees : you help 
to prune evergreens : you devise flower-gardens and 
winding walks. You talk to pigs, and smooth down the 
legs of horses. You sit on mossy walls, and saunter by 
the river side, and through woodland paths. You grow 
familiar with the internal arrangements of poor men's 
dwellings : you see much of men and women in those 
solemn seasons when all pretences are laid aside ; and 
they speak with confidence to you of their little cares 
and fears, for this world and the other. You kneel 
down and pray by the bedside of many sick ; and you 
know the look of the dying face well. Young children 
whom you have humbly sought to instruct in the best of 
knowledge, have passed away from this life in your 
presence, telling you in interrupted sentences whither 
they trusted they were going, and bidding you not forget 
to meet them there. You feel the touch of the weak 
fingers still ; the parting request is not forgotten. You 
mark the spring blossoms come back ; and you walk 
among the harvest sheaves in the autumn evening. And 
when you ride up the parish on your duty, you feel the 
influence of bare and lonely tracts, where, ten miles 
from home, you sometimes dismount from your horse, 
and sit down on a grey stone by the wayside, and look 
for an hour at the heather at your feet, and at the sweeps 
of purple moorland far away. You go down to the church- 
yard frequently: you sit on the gravestone of your 
predecessor who died two hundred years since ; and you 
count five, six, seven spots where those who served the 
cure before you sleep. Then, leaning your head upon 
your hand, you look thirty years into the future, and 



18 CONCERNING THE 

wonder whether you are to grow old. You read, through 
moss-covered letters, how a former incumbent of the 
parish died in the last century, aged twenty-eight. That 
afternoon, coming from a cottage where you had been 
seeing a frail old woman, you took a flying leap over a 
brook near, with precipitous sides ; and you thought that 
some day, if you lived, you would have to creep quietly 
round by a smoother way. And now you think you see 
an aged man, tottering and grey, feebly walking down to 
the churchyard as of old, and seating himself hard by 
where you sit. The garden will have grown weedy and 
untidy : it will not be the trim, precise dwelling which 
youthful energy and hopefulness keep it now. 

Let it be hoped that the old man's hat is not seedy, 
nor his coat threadbare : it makes one's heart sore to see 
that. And let it be hoped that he is not alone. But you 
go home, I think, with a quieter and kindlier heart. 

You live in a region, mental and material, that is very 
entirely out of the track of worldly ambition. You do 
not blame it in others : you have learnt to blame few 
things in others severely, except cruelty and falsehood : 
but you have outgrown it for yourself You hear, now 
and then, of this and the other school or college friend 
becoming a great man. One is an Indian hero : one is 
attorney -general : one is a cabinet minister. You like 
to see their names in the newspapers. You remember 
how, in college competitions with them, you did not 
come off second-best. You are struck at finding that 
such a man, whom you recollect as a fearful dunce, 
is getting respectably on through life : you remember 
how at school you used to wonder whether the difference 
between the clever boy and the booby would be in after 
days the same great gulf that it was then. Your life 



COUNTRY PARSON'S LIFE. 19 

goes on very regularly, each week much like the last. 
And, on the whole, it is very happy. You saunter for 
a little in the open air after breakfast : you do so when 
the evergreens are beautiful with snow as well as when 
the warm sunshine makes the grass white with widely- 
opened daisies. Your children go with you wherever 
you go. You are growing subdued and sobered ; but 
they are not : and when one sits on your knee, and lays 
upon your slioulder a little head with golden ringlets, 
you do not mind very much though your own hair (what 
is left of it) is getting shot with grey. You sit down in 
your quiet study to your work : what thousands of pages 
you have written at that table ! You cease your task at 
one o'clock: you read your Times: you get on horse- 
back and canter up the parish to see your sick: or you 
take the ribbons and tool into the county town. You 
feel the stir of even its quiet existence : you drop into 
the bookseller's : you grumble at the venerable age of 
the Reviews that come to you from the club. Generally, 
you cannot be bothered with calls upon your tattling 
acquaintances: you leave these to your wife. You 
drive home again, through the shady lanes, away into 
the green country : your man-servant in his sober livery 
tells you with pride, when you go to the stable-yard for 
a few minutes before dinner, that Mr. Snooks, the great 
judge of horse-flesh, had declared that afternoon in the 
inn-stable in town, that he had not seen a better-kept 
carriage and harness anywhere, and that your plump 
steed was a noble creature. It is well when a servant is 
proud of his belongings : he will be a happier man, and 
a more faithful and useful. When you next drive out 
you will see the silver blazing in the sun with increased 
brightness. And now you have the pleasant evening. 



20 CONCERNING THE 

before you. You never fail to dress for dinner : living 
so quietly as you do, it is especially needful, if you would 
avoid an encroaching rudeness, to pay careful attention 
to the little refinements of life. And the great event of 
the day over, you have music, books, and children : you 
have the summer saunter in the twilight : you have the 
winter evening fireside : you take perhaps another turn 
at your sermon for an hour or two. The day has 
brought its work and its recreation : you can look back 
each evening upon something done : save when you give 
yourself a holiday which you feel has been fairly toiled 
for. And what a wonderful amount of work, such as 
it is, you may, by exertion regular but not excessive, 
turn off in the course of the ten months and a-half of the 
working year ! 

And thus, day by day, and month by month, the life 
of the country parson passes quietly away. It will be 
briefly comprehended on his tombstone, in the assurance 
that he did his duty, simply and faithfully, through so 
many years. It is somewhat monotonous, but he is too 
busy to weary of it : it is varied by not much society, in 
the sense of conversation with educated men with whom 
the clergyman has many common feelings. But it is 
inexpressibly pleasing when, either to his own house or 
to a dwelling near, there comes a visitor with whom an 
entire sympathy is felt, though probably holding very 
antagonistic views: then come the 'good talks' with 
delighted Johnson : genial evenings, and long walks of 
afternoons. The daily post is a daily strong sensation, 
sometimes pleasing, sometimes painful, as he brings 
tidings of the outer world. You have your daily 
Times: each Monday morning brings your Saturday 
Review: and the Illustrated London News comes not 



COUNTRY PARSON'S LIFE. 21 

merely for the children's sake. You read all the Quar- 
terlies, of course : you skim the monthlies : but it is 
with tenfold interest and pleasure that month by month 
you receive that magazine which is edited by a dear 
friend who sends it to you, and in which sometimes 
certain pages have the familiar look of a friend's face. 
You draw it wet from its big envelope : you cut its 
leaves with care : you enjoy the fragrance of its steam 
as it dries at the study fire : you glance at the shining 
backs of that long row of volumes into which the 
pleasant monthly visitants have accumulated : you think 
you will have another volume soon. Then there is a 
great delight in occasionally receiving a large bundle of 
books which have been ordered from your bookseller in 
the city a hundred miles off: in reading the address in 
such big letters that they must have been made with a 
brush : in stripping off the successive layers of immense- 
ly thick brown paper : in reaching the precious hoard 
within, all such fresh copies (who are they that buy the 
copies you turn over in the shop, but which you would 
not on any account take ?) : such fresh copies, with their 
bran-new bindings and their leaves so pure in a material 
sense : in cutting the leaves at the rate of two or three 
volumes an evening, and in seeing the entire accession 
of literature lying about the other table (not the one you 
write on) for a few days ere they are given to the shelves. 
You are not in the least ashamed to confess that you are 
pleased by all these little things. You regard it as not 
necessarily proving any special pettiness of mind or 
heart. You regard it as no proof of greatness in any 
man, that he should appear to care nothing for anything. 
Your private belief is that it shows him to be either a 
humbug or a fool. 



22 THE COUNTRY PARSON'S LIFE. 

In this little volume the indulgent reader will find 
certain of those Essays which the writer discovered on 
cutting the leaves of the magazine which comes to him 
on the last day of every month. They were written, as 
something which might afford variety of work, which 
often proves the most restful of all recreation. They are 
nothing more than that which they are called, a country 
clergyman's Recreations. My solid work, and my first 
thoughts, are given to that which is the business and the 
happiness of my life. But these Essays have led me into 
a field which to myself was fresh and pleasant. And I 
have always returned from them, with increased interest, 
to graver themes and trains of thought. I have not 
forgot, as I wrote them, a certain time, when my little 
children must go away from their early home : when 
these evergreens I have planted and these walks I have 
made shall pass to my successor (may he be a better 
man !) ; and when I shall perhaps find my resting-place 
under those ancient oaks. Nor have I wholly failed to 
remember a coming day, when bishops and archbishops 
shall be called to render an account of the fashion in 
which they exercised their solemn and dignified trusts ; 
and when I, who am no more than the minister of a 
Scotch country parish, must answer for the diligence 
with which I served my little cure. 



CHAPTER 11. 
CONCERNING THE ART OF PUTTING THINGS 

BEING THOUGHTS ON REPRESENTATION AND 
MISREPRESENTATION. 




ET the reader be assured that the word 
Representation, which has caught his eye 
on glancing at the title of this essay, has 
nothing earthly to do with the Elective 
Franchise, whether in boroughs or counties. Not a 
syllable will be found upon the following pages bearing 
directly or indirectly upon any New Reform Bill. I do 
not care a rush who is member for this county. I have 
no doubt that all members of Parliament are very much 
alike. Everybody know^s that each individual legislator 
who pushes his way into the House, is actuated solely 
by a pure patriotic love for his country. No briefless 
barrister ever got into Parliament in the hope of getting 
a place of twelve hundred a year. No barrister in fair 
practice ever did so in the hope of getting a silk gown, 
or the Solicitor-Generalship, or a seat on the bench. 
No merchant or country-gentleman ever did so in the 
hope of gaining a little accession of dignity and influence 
in the town or county in which he lives. All these 
things are universally understood ; and they are men- 
tioned here merely to enable it to be said, that this 
treatise has nothinjr to do with them. 



24 CONCERNING THE 

Edgar Allan Poe, the miserable genius who died in 
America a few years ago, declared that he never had the 
least difficulty in tracing the logical steps by which he 
chose any subject on which he had ever written, and 
matured his plan for treating it. And some readers 
may remember a curious essay, contained in his collected 
works, in which he gives a minute account of the genesis 
of his extraordinary poem. The Raven. But Poe was a 
humbug ; and it is impossible to place the least faitli in 
anything said by him upon any subject whatever. In 
his writings we find him repeatedly avowing that he 
would assert any falsehood, provided it were likely to 
excite interest and ' create a sensation.' I believe that 
most authors could tell us that very frequently the con- 
ception and the treatment of their subject have darted on 
them all at once, they could not tell how. Many clergy- 
men know how strangely texts and topics of discourse 
have been suggested to them, while it was impossible to 
trace any link of association with what had occupied 
their minds the instant before. The late Douglas 
Jerrold relates how he first conceived the idea of one of 
his most popular productions. Walking on a winter day, 
he passed a large enclosure full of romping boys at play. 
He paused for a minute ; and as he looked and mused, a 
thought flashed upon him. It was not so beautiful, and 
you would say not so natural, as the reflections of Gray, 
as he looked from a distance at Eton College. As 
Jerrold gazed at the schoolboys, and listened to their 
merry shouts, there burst upon him the conception of 
Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures! There seems little 
enough connexion with what he was looking at ; and 
although Jerrold declared that the sight suggested the 
idea, he could not pretend to trace the link of association. 



ART OF PUTTING THINGS. 25 

It would be very interesting if we could accurately know 
the process by which authors, small or great, i)iece 
together their grander characters. How did Milton pile 
up his Satan ; how did vShakspeare put together Hamlet 
or Lady Macbeth; how did Charlotte Bronte imagine 
Rochester ? Writers generally keep their secrets, and 
do not let us see behind the scenes. We can trace, 
indeed, in successive pieces by Sheridan, the step-by-step 
development of his most brilliant jests, and of his most 
gushing bursts of the feeling of the moment. No doubt 
Lord Brougham had tried the woolsack, to see how it 
would do, before he fell on his knees upon it (on the 
impulse of the instant), at the end of his great speech 
on the Reform Bill. But of course Lord Brougham 
would not tell us ; and Sheridan did not intend us to know. 
Even Mr. Dickens, when, in his preface to the cheap 
edition of Pickwick^ he avows his purpose of telling us 
all about the origin of that amazingly successful serial, 
gives us no inkling of the process by which he produced 
the character which we all know so well. He tells us a 
great deal about the mere details of the work : the pages 
of letter-press, the number of illustrations, the price and 
times of publication. But the process of actual author- 
ship remains a mystery. The great painters would not 
tell where they got their colours. The effort which 
gives a new character to the acquaintance of hundreds 
of thousands of Englishmen, shall be concealed beneath 
a decorous veil. All that Mr. Dickens tells us is this : 
^ I thought of Mr. Pickwick, and wrote the first number. 
And to the natural question of curiosity, ' How on earth 
did you think of Mr. Pickwick?' the author's silence 
replies, 'I don't choose to tell you that!' 

And now, courteous reader, you are humbly asked to 



26 CONCERNING THE 

suffer the writer's discursive fashion, as he records how 
the idea of the present discourse, treatise, dissertation, or 
essay flashed upon his mind. Yesterday was a most 
beautiful frosty day. The air was indescribably exhil- 
arating : the cold was no more than bracing ; and as I 
fared forth for a walk of some miles, I saw the tower of 
the ancient church, green with centuries of ivy, looking 
through the trees which surround it, the green ivy 
silvered over with hoar-frost. The hedges on either 
hand, powdered with rime, were shining in the cold 
sunshine of the winter afternoon. First, I passed 
through a thick pinewood, bordering the road on both 
sides. The stems of the fir-trees had that warm, rich 
colour which is always pleasant to look at ; and the green 
branches were just touched with frost. One undervalues 
the evergreens in summer : their colour is dull when 
compared with the fresher and brighter green of the 
deciduous trees ; but now, when these gay transients 
have changed to shivering skeletons, the hearty firs, 
hollies, and yews warm and cheer the wintry landscape. 
Not the wintry, I should say, but the winter land- 
scape, which conveys quite a different impression. The 
word wintry wakens associations of bleakness, bareness, 
and bitterness ; a hearty evergreen tree never looks 
wintry, nor does a landscape to which such trees give 
the tone. Then emerging from the wood, I was in an 
open country. A great hill rises just ahead, which the 
road will skirt by and bye : on the right, at the foot of a 
little cliff hard by, runs a shallow, broad, rapid river. 
Looking across the river, I see a large range of nearly 
level park, which at a mile's distance rises into upland ; 
the park shows broad green glades, broken and bounded 
by fine trees, in clumps and in avenues. In summer- 



ART OF PUTTING THINGS. 27 

time you would see only the green leaves : but now, 
peering through the branches, you can make out the 
outline of the grey turrets of the baronial dwelling 
which has stood there, added to, taken from, patched, and 
altered, but still the same dwelling, for the last four 
hundred years. And on the left, I am just passing the 
rustic gateway through which you approach that quaint 
cottage on the knoll two hundred yards off — one story 
high, with deep thatch, steep gables, overhanging eaves, 
and verandah of rough oak — a sweet little place, where 
Izaak Walton might successfully have carried out the 
spirit of his favourite text, and ' studied to be quiet.' 
All this way, three miles and more, I did not meet a 
human being. There was not a breath of air through 
the spines of the firs, and not a sound except the ripple 
of the river. I leant upon a gate, and looked into a 
field. vSomething was grazing in the field ; but I cannot 
remember whether it was cows, sheep, oxen, elephants, 
or camels; for as I was looking, and thinking how I 
should begin a sermon on a certain subject much thought 
upon for the last fortnight, my mind resolutely turned 
away from it, and said, as plainly as mind could 
express it, For several days to come I shall produce 
material upon no subject but one, — and that shall be the 
comprehensive, practical, suggestive, and most important 
subject of the Art of Putting Things ! 

And indeed there is hardly a larger subject, in relation 
to the social life of the nineteenth century in England ; 
and there is hardly a practical problem to the solution of 
which so great an amount of ingenuity and industry, 
honest and dishonest, is daily brought, as the grand 
problem of setting forth yourself, your goods, your 
horses, your case, your plans, your thoughts and argu- 
ments — all your belongings, in short — to the best 



28 CONCERNING THE 

advantage. From the Prime Minister, who exerts all 
his wonderful skill and eloquence to put his policy before 
Parliament and the country in the most favourable light, 
and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who does his very 
best to cast a rosy hue even upon an income-tax, down 
to the shopman who arranges his draperies in the window 
against market-day in that fashion which he thinks will 
prove most fascinating to the maid-servant with her 
newly-paid wages in her pocket, and the nurse who in a 
most lively and jovial manner assures a young lady of 
three years old that she will never feel the taste of her 
castor-oil, — yea, even to the dentist who with a joke 
and a smiling face approaches you with his forceps in his 
hand:^ — from the great Attorney-General seeking to 
place his view of his case with convincing force before 
a bewildered jury (that view being flatly opposed to 
common sense), down to the schoolboy found out in some 
mischievous trick and trying to throw the blame upon 
somebody else: almost all civilized beings in Great 
Britain are from morning to night labouring hard to put 
things in general or something in particular in the way 
that they think will lead to the result which best suits 
their views ; — are, in short, practising the art of repre- 
senting or misrepresenting things for their own advantage. 
Great skill, you would say, must result from this con- 
stant practice: and indeed it probably does. But then, 
people are so much in the habit of trying to put things 
themselves, that they are uncommonly sharp at seeing 
through the devices of others. ' Set a thief to catch a 
thief,' says the ancient adage : and so, set a man who can 
himself tell a very plausible story without saying any- 
thing positively untrue, to discover the real truth under 
the rainbow tints of the plausible story told by another. 
But do not fancy, my kind reader, that I have any 



AUT OF PUTTING THINGS. 29 

purpose of making a misanthropical onslaught upon poor 
humanity. I am very far from desiring to im})ly that 
there is anything essentially wrong or dishonest in trying 
to put things in the most favourable light for our views 
and plans. The contrary is the case. It is a noble gift, 
when a man is able to put great truths or momentous 
facts before our minds with that vividness and force 
which shall make us feel these facts and truths in their 
grand reality. A great evil, to which human beings are 
by their make subject, is, that they can talk of things, 
know things, and understand things, without feeling them 
in their true importance — without, in short, realizing 
them. There appears to be a certain numbness about 
the mental organs of perception ; and the man who is 
able to put things so strikingly, clearly, pithily, forcibly, 
glaringly, whether these things are religious, social, or 
political truths, as to get through that numbness, that 
crust of insensibility, to the quick of the mind and heart, 
must be a great man, an earnest man, an honest man, a 
good man. I believe that any great reformer will find 
less practical discouragement in the opposition of bad 
people than in the inertia of good people. You cannot 
set them to feel that the need and the danger are so 
imminent and urgent ; you cannot get them to bestir 
themselves with the activity and energy which the case de- 
mands. You cannot get them to take it in that the open 
sewer and the airless home of the working man are such a 
very serious matter ; you cannot get them to feel that the 
vast uneducated masses of the British population form a 
mine beneath our feet which may explode any day, with 
God knows what devastation. I think that not all tlie won- 
derful eloquence, freshness, and pith of Mr. Kingsley form 
a talent so valuable as his power of compelling people to 



30 CONCERNING THE 

feel what they had always known and talked about, but 
never felt. And wherein lies that power, but just in his 
skill io put things — in his power of truthful representation? 

Sydney Smith was once talking with an Irish Roman 
Catholic priest about the proposal to endow the Romish 
Church in Ireland. ' We would not take the Saxon 
money,' said the worthy priest, quite sincerely ; ' we 
would not defile our fingers with it. No matter whether 
Parliament offered us endowments or not, we would not 
receive them.' 'Suppose,' repHed Sydney Smith, 'you 
were to receive an official letter that on calling at such a 
bank in the town three miles , off, you would hereafter 
receive a hundred pounds a quarter, the first quarter's 
allowance payable in advance on the next day ; and 
suppose that }0U wanted money to do good, or to buy 
books, or anything else : do you mean to say you would 
not drive over to the town and take the hundred pounds 
out of the bank ? ' The priest was staggered. He had 
never looked at the thing in that precise light. He 
had never had the vague distant question of endowment 
brought so home to him. He had been quite sincere in 
his spirited repudiation of Saxon coin, as recorded above; 
but he had not exactly understood what he was saying 
and doing. ' Oh, Mr. Smith,' he replied, ' yoit have such 
a way of putting things ! ' What a triumph of the 
Anglican's art of truthful representation ! 

One of the latest instances of skill in putting things 
which I remember to have struck me I came upon, 
where abundance of such skill may be found — in a 
leading article in the Times. The writer of that article 
was endeavouring to show that the work of the country 
clergy is extremely light. Of course he is sadly mis- 
taken; but this by the way. As to sermons, said the 



ART OF PUTTING THINGS. 31 

lively writer (I don't pretend to give his exact vvordft), 
what work is tliere in a sermon ? Just fancy that you 
are writing half a dozen letters of four pages each, and 
crossed ! The thing was cleverly put ; and it really 
came on me with the force of a fact, a new and surprising 
fact. Many sermons has this thin right hand written ; 
but my impression of a sermon, drawn from some years' 
experience, is of a composition very different from a 
letter — something demanding that brain and heart 
should be worked to the top of their bent for more hours 
than need be mentioned here ; something implying as 
hard and as exhausting labour as man can well go through. 
Surely, I thought, I have been working under a sad 
delusion ! Only half a dozen light letters of gossip to a 
friend : that is tlie amount of work implied in a sermon ! 
Have I been all these years making a bugbear of such a 
simple and easy matter as tliat"^ Here is a new and 
cheerful way of putting the thing! But unhappily, 
though the clever representation would no doubt convey 
to some thousands of readers the impression that to write 
a sermon was a very simple affair after all, it broke 
down, it crumpled up, it went to pieces when brouglit to 
the test of fact. When next morning I had written my 
text, I thought to myself, Now here I have just to do the 
same amount of work which it would cost me to write 
half a dozen letters to half a dozen friends, giving them 
our little news. Ah, it would not do ! In a little, I was 
again in the struggle of mapping out my subject, and 
cutting a straight track through the jungle of the world 
of mind ; looking about for illustrations, seeking words 
to put my meaning with clearness and interest before the 
simple country folk I preach to. It was not the least 
like letter-writing. The clever writer's way of putting 



32 CONCERNING THE 

things was wrong; and though I acquit hira of any 
crime beyond sjDeaking with authority of a thing which 
he knew nothing about, I must declare that his repre- 
sentation was a misrepresentation. If you have sufficient 
skill, you may put what is painful so that it shall sound 
pleasant : you may put a wearisome journey by railway 
in such a connexion with cozy cushions, warm rugs, a 
review or a new book, storm sweeping the fields without, 
and warmth and ease within, that it shall seem a delight- 
ful thing. You may put work, in short, so that it shall 
look like play. But actual experiment breaks down the 
representation. You cannot change the essential nature 
of things. You cannot make black white, though a 
clever man may make it seem so. 

Still, we all have a great love for trying to put any 
hard work or any painful business, which it is certain we 
must go through, in such a light as may make it seem 
less terrible. And it is not difficult to deceive ourselves 
when we are eager to be deceived. No one can tell how 
much comfort poor Damien drew from the way in which 
he put the case on the morning of his death by horrible 
tortures : ' The day will be long,' he said, ' but it will 
have an end.' No one can tell what a gleam of light 
may have darted upon the mind of Charles I. as he 
knelt to the block, when Bishop Juxon put encouragingly 
the last trial the monarch had to go through : ' one last 
stage, somewhat turbulent and troublesome, hut still a 
very short one.^ No one can tell how much it soothed 
the self-love of Tom Purdie, when Sir Walter Scott 
ordered him to cut down some trees which Tom wished 
to stand, and positively commanded that they should go 
down in spite of all Tom's arguments and expostulations, 
and all this in the presence of a number of gentlemen 



ART OF PUTTING THINGS. 33 

before whom Tom could not bear any impeachment of 
his woodcraft ; no one, I say, can tell how much it 
soothed the worthy forester's self-love when after half an 
hour's sulky meditation he thought of the happy plan of 
putting the thing on another footing than that of obedi- 
ence to an order, and looking up cheerfully again, said, 
' As for those trees, I think I '11 tal^ your advice^ Sir 
Walter ! ' Would it be possible, I wonder, thus pleasant- 
ly to jput the writing of an article so as to do away the 
sense of the exertion which writing an article implies ? 
Have we not all little tricks which we play upon our- 
selves, to make our labour seem lighter, our dignity 
greater, our whole position jollier, than in our secret soul 
we know is the fact ? Think, then, thou jaded man, 
bending over the written page which is one day to attain 
the dignity of print in Fraser or Blackicood, how in 
these words thou art addressing many thousands of thy 
enlightened countrymen and thy fair countrywomen, and 
becoming known (as Fielding puts it in one of his 
simply felicitous sentences) ' to numbers who otherwise 
never saw or knew thee, and whom thou shalt never see 
or know.' Think how thou shalt lie upon massive 
library-tables, in substantially elegant libraries, side by 
side perhaps with Helps, Kingsley, or Hazlitt; how 
thou shalt lighten the cares of middle-aged men, and (if 
thou art a writer of fiction) be smuggled up to young 
ladies' chambers ; who shall think, as they read thy 
article (oh, much mistaken !), what a nice man thou art ! 
Alas ! all that way of putting things is mere poetry. It 
wont do. It still remains, and always must remain, the 
stretch and strain of mind and muscle, to write. Let 
not the critic be severe on people who write ill: they 
deserve much credit and sympathy because they write at 



34 CONCERNING THE 

all. But though these grand and romantic ways of 
putting the writing of one's article will not serve, there 
are little prosaic material expedients which really avail 
to put it in a light in which it looks decidedly less 
laborious. Slowly let the large drawer be pulled out 
wherein lies the paper which will serve, if we are allowed 
to see them, for many months to come. There lies the 
l^rge blue quarto, so thick and substantial ; there the 
massive foolscap, so soft and smooth, over which the pen 
so pleasantly and unscratchingly ghdes ; that is the raw 
material for tlie article. Draw it forth deliberately : fold 
it accurately : then the ivory stridently cuts it through. 
Weigh the paper in your hand ; then put the case thus: 
' Well, it is only covering these pages with writing, after 
all ; it is just putting three-and-twenty lines, of so many 
words each on the average, upon each of these unblotted 
surfaces.' Surely there is not so much in that. Do not 
think of all the innumerable processes of mind that go 
to it ; of the weighing of the consequences of general 
propositions ; of the choice of words ; of the pioneering 
your track right on, not turning to either hand ; of the 
memory taxed to bring up old thoughts upon your subject ; 
of the clock striking unheard while you are bent upon 
your task, so much harder than carrying any reasonable 
quantity of coals, or blacking ever so many boots, or 
currying ever so many horses. Just stick to this view 
of the matter, just put the thing this way — that all you 
have to do is to blacken so many pages, and take the 
comfort of that way of putting it. 

To such people as we human beings are, there is hard- 
ly any matter of greater practical importance than what 
we have called the Art of Putting Things. For, to us, 
things are what they seem. They affect us just according 



ART OF PUTTING THINGS. 35 

to what we think them. Our knowledge of things, and 
our feeling in regard to things, are all contingent on the 
way in which these things have been put before us ; and 
what different ways there are of putting every possible 
doctrine, or opinion, or doing, or thing, or event ! And 
what mischievous results, colouring all our views and feel- 
ings, may follow from an important subject having been 
wrongly, disagreeably, injudiciously put to us when we 
were children ! How many men hate Sunday all their 
lives because it w^as put to them so gloomily in their 
boyhood ; and how many Englishmen, on the other hand, 
fancy a Scotch Sunday the most disagreeable of days 
because the case has been wrongly put to them, while in 
truth there is, in intelligent religious Scotch families, no 
more pleasant, cheerful, genial, restful, happy day. And 
did not Byron always hate Horace, put to him in youth 
with the associations of impositions and the birch ? 
There is no more sunshiny inmate of any home than the 
happy-tempered one who has the art of putting all things 
in a pleasant light, from the great misfortunes of life 
down to a broken carriage-spring, a servant's failings, a 
child's salts and senna. You are extremely indignant at 
some person who has used you ill ; you are worried and 
annoyed at his misconduct ; it is as though you were 
going about with a mustard blister applied to your mind: 
when a word or two from some genial friend puts the 
entire matter in a new light, and your irritation goes, the 
blister is removed, your anger dies out, you would like to 
pat the offending being on the head, and say you bear 
him no mahce. And it is wonderful what a little thing 
sometimes suffices to put a case thus differently. When 
you are complaining of somebody's ill-usage, it will 
change your feeling and the look of things, if the friend 



36 CONCERNING THE 

you are speaking to does no more than say of the peccant 
brother, ' Ah ! poor fellow ! ' I think that every man 
or woman who has got servants, and who has pretty fre- 
quently to observe (I mean to see, not to speak of) some 
fault on their part, owes a deep debt of gratitude to the 
man, whoever he was, who thus kindly and wisely gave 
us a forbearing stand-point from which to regard a ser- 
vant's failings, by putting the thing in this way, true in 
itself though new to many, that you cannot expect per- 
fection for fourteen, or even for fifty pounds a-year. Has 
not that way of putting things sometimes checked you 
when you meditated a sharp reproof, and allayed anger 
which otherwise would have been pretty hot ? Even 
when a rogue cheats you (though that, I confess, is a 
peculiarly irritating thing), is not your wrath mollified by 
putting the thing thus : that the poor wretch probably 
needed very much the money out of which he cheated 
you, and would not have cheated you if he could have 
got it honestly? When a horse-dealer sells you, at a 
remarkably stiff figure, a broken-winded steed, do not 
yield to unqualified indignation. True, the horse-dealer 
is always ready to cheat ; but feel for the poor fellow, 
every man thinks it right to cheat him ; and with every 
man's hand against him, what wonder though his hand 
should be against every man ? Everything, you see, 
turns on the way in which you put things. And it is so 
from earliest youth to latest age. The old scholar, whose 
delight is to sit among his books, thus puts his library : — 

My days among the dead are passed: 

Around me 1 behold, 
Where'er these casual eyes are cast, 

The mighty minds of old: 
My never-failing friends are they, 
With whom 1 converse night and day. * 

* Southey. 



ART OF PUTTING THINGS. 37 



You see the library was not mere shelves of books, 
and the books were not mere printed pages. You remem- 
ber how Robinson Crusoe, in his cheerful moods, put his 
island home. He sat down to his lonely meal, but that 
was not how he put things. No. ' Here was my majesty, 
all alone by myself", attended by my servants :' his ser- 
vants being the dog, parrot, and cat. I remember how 
a wealthy merchant, a man quite of the city as opposed 
to the country, once talked of emigrating to America, and 
buying an immense tract of land, where he and his fam- 
ily should lead a simple, unartificial, innocent life. He 
was not in the least cut out for such a life, and would 
have been miserable in it, but he was fascinated with the 
notion because he put it thus: — 'I shall have great 
flocks and herds, and live in a tent like Abraham.'' And 
that way of putting things brought up before the busy 
man of the nineteenth century I know not what sweet 
picture of a primevally quiet and happy life. I can 
remember yet how, when I crept about my father's study, 
a little boy of three years old, I felt the magic of the art 
of putting things. All children are restless. It is impos- 
sible for them to remain still, and we all know how a 
child in a study worries the busy scholar. All admoni- 
tions to keep quiet failed ; it was really impossible to 
obey them. Creep, creep about ; upset footstools ; pull 
off table-covers ; upset ink. But when the thing was 
put in a diflPerent way; when the kind voice said, — 
' Now, you '11 be my little dog : creep into your house 
there under the table, and lie quite still, ' there was no 
difficulty in obeying that command : and, except an occa- 
sional bow-wow, there was perfect stillness. Tlie art of 
putting things had prevailed. It was necessary to keep 
still ; for a dog in a study, I knew, must keep still, and I 
was a dos. 



38 CONCERNING THE 

It must be a worrying thing for a great warrior or 
statesman, fighting a great battle, or introducing a great 
legislative measure, to remember that the estimation in 
which he is to be held in his own day and country, and 
in other countries and ages, depends not at all on what 
his conduct is in itself, but entirely on the way in which 
it shall be put before mankind — represented, or misrep- 
resented, in newspapers, in rumours, in histories. How 
very unlikely it is that history will ever put the case on 
its real merits : the characters of history will either be 
praised far above their deserts, or abused far beyond 
their sins. ' Do not read history to me,' said Sir Robert 
Walpole, 'for that, I know, must be false.' History 
could be no more than the record of the way in which 
men had agreed to put things ; and those behind the 
scenes, the men who pull the wires which move the 
puppets, must often have reason to smile at the absurd 
mistakes into which the history-writing outsiders fall. 
And even apart from ignorance, or bias, or intention to 
deceive, w^iat a fearful thought it must be to a great 
man taking a conspicuous part in some great solemnity, 
such as the trial of a queen, or the impeachment of a 
governor-general, to reflect that this great solemnity, and 
his own share in it, and how he looked, and what he said, 
may possibly be put before mankind by the great histo- 
rian Mr. Wordy ! One can enter into Jolinson's feeling 
when, on hearing that Boswell intended to write his 
biography, he exclaimed, in mingled terror and fury — 
^If I thought that he contemplated writing my life, I 
should render that impossible by taking his ! ' It was 
something to shudder at, the idea of going down to 
posterity as represented by a Boswell ! But the great 
lexicographer was mistaken : the Dutch-painter-like bi- 



ART OF PUTTING THINGS. 39 

ography showed him exactly as he was, the great, little, 
mighty, weak, manly, babyish mind and heart. And not 
great men alone, historical personages, have this reason 
for disquiet and apprehension. Don't you know, my 
reader not unversed in the ways of life, that it depends 
entirely on how the story is told, how the thing is repre- 
sented or misrepresented, whether your conduct on any 
given occasion shall appear heroic or ridiculous, reason- 
able or absurd, natural or affected, modest or impudent : 
and don't you know, too, what a vast number of ill-set 
people are always ready to give the story the unfavour- 
able turn, to put the matter in the bad light ; and how 
many more, not really ill-set, not really with any mali- 
cious intention, are prompted by their love of fun, in 
relating any act of any acquaintance, to try to set it in a 
ridiculous light? Your domestic establishment is shabby 
or unpretending, elegant or tawdry, just as the fancy of 
the moment may lead your neighbour to put the thing. 
Your equipage is a neat little turn-out or a shabby 
attempt, your house is quiet or dull, yourself a genius or 
a blockhead, just as it may strike your friend on the 
instant to put the thing. And don't we all know some 
people — not bad people in the main — who never by 
any chance put the thing except in the unfavourable 
way ? I have heard the selfsame house called a snug 
little [)lace and a miserable little hole ; the same man 
called a lively talker and an absurd rattlebrain; the same 
person called a gentlemanlike man and a missy piece of 
affectation ; the same income called competence and 
starvation ; the same horse called a noble animal and an 
old white cow : — the entire difference, of course, lay in 
the fashion in which the narrator chose, from inherent 
bonhomie or inherent verjuice, to put the thing. While 



40 CONCERNING THE 

Mr. Bright probably regards it as the most ennobling 
occupation of humanity to buy in the cheapest and sell 
in the dearest market, Byron said, as implying the 
lowest degree of degradation — 

Trust not for freedom to the Franks, — 
They have a king who buys and sells ! 

And it is just the two opposite ways of putting the 
same admitted fact, to say that Britain is the first 
mercantile community of the world, and to say that we 
are a nation of shopkeepers. One way of putting the 
fact is the dignified, the other is the degrading. If a 
boy plays truant or falls asleep in church, it just depends 
on how you put it, or how the story is told, whether you 
are to see in all this the natural thoughtlessness of boy- 
hood, or a first step towards the gallows. ' Billy Brown 
stole some of my apples,' says a kind-hearted man : ' well, 
poor fellow, I daresay he seldom gets any.' ' Billy Brown 
stole my apples,' says the severe man : ' ah, the vagabond, 
he is born to be hanged.' Sydney Smith put Catholic 
Emancipation as common justice and common sense : Dr. 
McNeile puts it as a great national sin, and the origin of the 
potato disease. John Foster mentions in his Diary, that 
he once expostulated with a great, hulking, stupid bump- 
kin, as to some gross transgression of which he had been 
guilty. Little effect was produced on the bumpkin, for 
dense stupidity is a great duller of the conscience. Foster 
persisted : ' Do not you think,' he said, ' that the Almighty 
will be angry at such conduct as yours ? ' Blockhead as 
the fellow was, he could take in the idea of my essay : he 
rephed, 'That's just as A tak's ut!' But what struck 
little Paul Dombey as strange, that the same bells rung 
for weddings and for funerals, and that the same sound 
was merry or doleful, just as we put it, is true of many 



ART OF PUTTING THINGS. 41 

things besides bells. The character of everything we 
hear or see is reflected upon it from our own minds. 
The sun sees the earth look bright because it first inade 
it so. You go to a public meeting, my friend. You 
make a speech. You get on, you think, uncommonly 
well. When your auditor Mr. A. or Miss B. goes home, 
and is asked there what sort of appearance you made, 
don't you fancy that the reply will be affected in any 
appreciable degree by the actual fact ! It depends 
entirely on the state of the relator's nerves or digestion, 
or the passing fancy of the moment, whether you shall 
be said to have done delightfully or disgustingly ; whether 
you shall be said to have made a brilliant figure, or to have 
made a fool of yourself. You never can be sure, though 
you spoke with the tongue of angels, but that ill-nature, 
peevishness, prejudice, thoughtlessness, may put the case 
that your speech was most abominable. Do you fancy 
that you could ever say or do anything that Mr. Snarhng 
could not find fault with, or Miss Limejuice could not 
misrepresent ? 

Years ago I was accustomed to frequent the courts of 
law, and to listen with much interest to the great advo- 
cates of that time, as Follett, Wilde, Thesiger, Kelly. 
Nowhere in the world, I think, is one so deeply impressed 
with the value of tact and skill in putting things, as in 
the Court of Queen's Bench at the trial of an impor- 
tant case by a jury. Does not all the enormous differ- 
ence, as great as that between a country bumpkin and a 
hog, between Follett and INIr. Briefless, lie simply in 
their respective powers of putting things? The actual 
facts, the actual merits of the case, have very little indeed 
to do with the verdict, compared with the counsel's skill in 
putting them ; the artful marshalling of circumstances, the 



42 CONCERNING THE 

casting weak points into shadow, and bringing out strong 
points into glaring relief. I remember how I used to 
look with admiration at one of these great men when, in 
his speech to the jury, he was approaching some circum- 
stance in the case which made dead against him. It was 
beautiful to see the intellectual gladiator cautiously- 
approaching the hostile fact ; coming up to it, tossing and 
turning it about, and finally showing that it made strongly 
in his favour. Now, if that was really so, why did it 
look as if it made against him ? Why should so much 
depend on the way in which he put it? Or, if the fact 
was in truth one that made against him, why should it be 
possible for a man to put it so that it should seem to make 
in his favour, and all without any direct falsification of 
facts or arguments, without any of that mere vulgar mis- 
representation which can be met by direct contradiction ? 
Surely it is not a desirable state of matters, that a plaus- 
ible fellow should be able to explain away some very 
doubtful conduct of his own, and by skilful putting of 
things should be able to make it seem even to the least 
discerning that he is the most innocent and injured of 
human beings. And it is provoking, too, w^hen you feel 
at once that his defence is a mere intellectual juggle, and 
yet, with all your logic, when you cannot just on the 
instant tear it to pieces, and put the thing in the light of 
truth. Indeed, so w^ell is it understood that by tact and 
address you may so put things as to make the worse 
appear the better reason, that the idea generally conveyed, 
when we talk of putting things, is, that there is something 
wrong, something to be adroitly concealed, some weak 
point in regard to which dust is to be thrown into too 
observant eyes. There is a common impression, not one 
of unqualified truth, that when all is above board, there 



ART OF PUTTING THINGS. 43 

is less need for skilful putting of the case. Many people 
think, though the case is by no means so, that truth may 
always be depended on to tell its own story and produce 
its due impression. Not a bit of it. However good my 
case might be, I should be sorry to intrust it to Mr. Num- 
skull, with Sir Fitzroy Kelly on the other side. 

It is a coarse and stupid expedient to have recourse to 
anything like falsification in putting things as they would 
make best for yourself, reader. And there in no need 
for it. Unless you have absolutely killed a man and 
taken his watch, or done something equally decided, you 
can easily represent circumstances so as to throw a favour- 
able light upon yourself and your conduct. It is a mis- 
take to fancy that in this world a story must be either 
true ol' false, a deed either right or wrong, a man either 
good or bad. There are few questions which can be 
answered by Yes or No. Almost all actions and events 
are of mingled character ; and there is something to be 
said on both sides of almost every subject which can be 
debated. Who does not remember how^, when he was a 
boy, and had done some mischief which he was too honest 
to deny, he revolved all he had done over and over, put- 
ting it in many lights, trying it in all possible points of 
view, till he had persuaded himself that he had done 
quite right, or at least that he had done nothing that was 
so very wrong, after all ? There was a lurking feeling, 
probably, that all this was self-deception ; and oh ! how 
our way of putting the case, so favourably to ourselves, 
vanished into air when our Teacher and Governor sternly 
called us to account ! All those Jesuitical artifices were 
forgotten ; and we just felt that we had done wrong, and 
there was no use trying to justify it. 

The noble use of the power of putting things, is when 



44 CONCERNING THE 

a man employs that power to give tenfold force to truth. 
When you go and hear a great preacher, you sometimes 
come away wishing heartily that the impression he made 
on you would last : for you feel that though what struck 
you so much was not the familiar doctrine, which you 
knew quite well before, but the way in which he put it, 
still that startling view of things was the right view. 
Probably in the pulpit more than anywhere else, we feel 
the difference between a man who talks about and about 
things — and another man who puts them so that we/eeZ 
them. And when one thinks of all the ignorance, want, 
and misery which surround us in the wretched dwellings 
of the poor, which we know all about but take so coolly, it 
is sad to remember that Truth does not make itself felt 
as it really is, but depends so sadly for the practical effect 
upon the skill with which it is put — upon the tact, 
graphic power, and earnest purpose of the man who tells 
it. A landed proprietor will pass a wretched row of cot- 
tages on his estate daily for years, yet never think of 
making an effort to improve them : who, when the thing 
is fairly put to him, will forthwith bestir himself to have 
things brought into a better state. He will wonder how 
he could have allowed matters to go on in that unhappy 
style so long ; but will tell you truly, that though the 
thing was before his eyes, he really never before thought 
of it in that light. 

Some people have a happy knack for putting in a 
pleasant way everything that concerns themselves. Mr. 
A.'s son gets a poor place as a Bank clerk : his father 
goes about saying that the lad has found a fine opening in 
business. The young man is ordained, and gets a curacy 
on Salisbury Plain : his father rejoices that there, never 
seeing a human face, he has abundant leisure for study, 



ART OF PUTTING THINGS. 45 

and for improving his mind. Or, the curacy is in the 
most crowded part of Manchester or Bethnal Green : the 
father now rejoices that his son has opportunities of 
acquiring clerical experience, and of visiting the homes 
of the poor. Such a man's house is in a well-wooded 
country : the situation is delightfully sheltered. He 
removes to a bare district without a tree : — ah ! there he 
has beautiful pure air and extensive views. It is well for 
human beings when they have the pleasant art of thus 
putting things ; for many, we all know, have the art of 
putting things in just the opposite way. They look 
at all things through jaundiced eyes ; and as things 
appear to themselves, so they put them to others. You 
remember, reader, how once upon a time David Hume, 
the historian, kindly sent Rousseau a present of a dish 
of beef-steaks. Rousseau fired at this : he discerned in 
it a deep-laid insult : he put it that Hume, by sending the 
steaks, meant to insinuate that he, Rousseau, could not 
afford to buy proper food for himself. Ah, I have known 
various Rousseaus ! They had not the genius, indeed, 
but they had all the wrongheadedness. 

Who does not know the contrasted views of mankind 
and of life that pervade all the writings of Dickens and of 
Thackeray ? It is the same world that lies before both, 
but how differently they put it ! And look at the accounts 
in the Blue and Yellow newspapers respectively, of the 
borough Member's speech to his constituents last night 
in the Corn Exchange. Judge by the account in the one 
paper, and he is a Burke for eloquence, a Peel for tact, a 
Shippen for incorruptible integrity. Judge by the account 
in the other, and you would wonder where the electors 
caught a mortal who combines so remarkably ignorance, 
stupidity, carelessness, inefficiency, and dishonesty. As 



46 CONCERNING THE 

for the speech, one journal declares it was fluent, the 
other that it was stuttering ; one that it was frank, the 
other that it was trimming ; one that it was sense, the 
other that it was nonsense. Nor need it be supposed that 
either journal intends deliberate falsehood. Each believes 
his own way of putting the case to be the right way ; and 
the truth, in most instances, doubtless lies midway between. 
But in fact, till the end of time, there will be at least two 
ways of putting everything. Perhaps the M. P. warmed 
with his subject, and threw himself heart and soul into 
his speech. Shall we say tliat he spoke with eloquent 
energy, or shall we put it that he bellowed like a bull? 
Was he quiet and correct ? Then we may choose be- 
tween saying that he is a classical speaker, and that he 
was as stiff as a poker. Pie made some jokes, perhaps : 
take your choice whether you shall call him clever or 
flippant, a wit or a buifoon. And so of everybody else. 
You know a clever, well-read young woman : you may 
either call her such, or talk sneeringly of blue-stockings. 
You meet a lively, merry girl, who laughs and talks with 
all the frankness of innocence. Tou would say of her, 
my kindly reader, something like what I have just said ; 
but crabbed Mrs. Backbite will have it that she is a romp, 
a boisterous hoyden, of most unformed manners. Per- 
haps Mrs. Backbite, spitefully shaking her head, says she 
trusts, she really hopes, there is no harm in the girl — 
but certainly no daughter of hers should be allowed to 
associate with her. And not merely does the way, favour- 
able or unfavourable, in which the thing shall be put, 
depend mainly on the temperament of the person who puts 
it — so that you shall know beforehand that Mr. Snarling 
will always give the unfavourable view, and Mr. JoUikin 
the favourable : but a further element of disturbance is 



ART OF PUTTING THINGS. 47 

introduced by the fact, tliat often the narrator's mood is 
such, that it is a toss-up, five minutes before he begins to 
tell his story, whether he shall put the conduct of his hero 
as good or bad. 

Who needs the art of putting things more tlian the 
painter of portraits ? Who sees so much of the little- 
ness, the petty vanity, the silliness, of mankind ? It must 
be hard for such a man to retain much respect for human 
nature. The lurking belief in the mind of every man, 
that he is remarkably good-looking, concealed in daily 
intercourse with his fellows, breaks out in the painter's 
studio. And, without positive falsification, how cleverly 
the artist often contrives to put the features and figure of 
his sitter in a satisfactory fashion ! Have not you seen 
the portrait of a plain, and even a very ugly person, 
which was strikingly like, and still very pleasant looking 
and almost pretty ? Have not you seen things so skil- 
fully put, that the little snob looked dignified, the vulgar 
boor gentlemanlike, the plain-featured woman angelic — 
and all the while the likeness was accurately preserved ? 

It seems to me that in the case of many of those fine 
things which stir the heart and bring moisture to the 
eye, it depends entirely on the way in which they are 
put, whether they shall strike us as pathetic or silly, as 
sublime or ridiculous. The venerable aspect of the de- 
throned monarch, led in the triumphal procession of the 
Roman Emperor, and looking indifferently on the scene, 
as he repeated often the words of Solomon, ' Vanity, van- 
ity, all is vanity,' depends much for the effect it always 
produces on the reader, upon the stately yet touching 
fashion in which Gibbon tells the story. So with Haz- 
litt's often-recurring account of Poussin's celebrated 
picture, the Et in Arcadia Ego. As for Durke fiinging 



48 CONCERNING THE 

the dagger upon the floor of the House of Commons, and 
Brougham falhng on his knees in the House of Peers, 
what a ridiculous representation Punch could give of 
such things ! What shall be said of Addison, often tipsy 
in life, yet passing away with the words addressed to his 
regardless step-son, ' See in what peace a Christian can 
die ! ' We need not think of things which are essentially 
ridiculous, though their perpetrators intended them to be 
sublime : as Lord Ellenborough's proclamation about the 
Gates of Somnauth, Sir William Codrington's despatch 
as to the blowing up of Sebastopol, and all the grand pas- 
sages in the writings of Mr. Wordy. Let me confess 
that I do think it a very unhealthy sign of the times, 
this love which now exists of putting grave matters 
in a ridiculous light, which produces Comic Histories of 
England, Comic Blackstones, Comic Parliamentary De- 
hates, Comic Latin Grammars, and the like. Dreary 
indeed must be the fun of such books ; but that is not the 
worst of them. Yet one cannot seriously object to such a 
facetious serial as Punch, which represents the funny 
element in our sad insular character. Punch lives by the 
art of putting things, and putting them in a single way ; 
but how wonderfully well, how successfully, how genially, 
he puts all things funnily ! But to burlesque Macheth 
or Othello, to travesty Virgil, to parody the soliloquy in 
Hamlet, though it may be putting things in a novel and 
amusing way, approaches to the nature of sacrilege. 
Sometimes, indeed, the ludicrous way of putting things 
has served an admirable purpose ; as in the imitations of 
Southey's Sapphics and Kotzebue's morality in the 
Poetry of the Anti-jacohin. And the ludicrous way of 
putting things has sometimes brought them much more 
vividly home to ' men's business and bosoms,' as in Syd- 



ART OF TUTTING THINGS. 49 

ney Smith's description of the possible resuUs of a French 
invasion. Nor has it failed to answer the end of most 
cogent argument, as in his description of Mrs. Partington 
sweeping back the Atlantic Ocean. 

Do not ffincy, my friend, that you can by possibility so 
live that ill-natured folk will not be able to put every- 
thing you do unfavourably. The old man with the ass 
was a martyr to the desire so to act that there should be 
no possibility of putting what he did as wrong. And 
when John Gilpin's wife, for fear the neighbours should 
think her proud, caused the chaise to draw up five 
doors off, rely upon it some of the neighbours would say 
she did so in the design of making her carriage the 
more conspicuous. When you give a dinner-party, and 
after your guests are gone, sit down and review the prog- 
ress of the entertainment, thinking how nicely every- 
thing went on, do you remember, madam, that at that 
same moment your guests are seated in their own homes, 
putting all the circumstances in quite a different way: 
laughing at your hired greengrocer, who, (you were just 
saying) looked so like a butler ; execrating your cham- 
pagne, which (you are this moment flattering yourself) 
passed for the product of the grape and not of the goose- 
berry ; and generally putting yourself, your children, 
your house, your dinner, your company, your music, into 
such ridiculous lights, that, if you knew it (which happily 
you never will), you would wish that you had mingled 
a little strychnine with the vintage so vilified. Still, it 
is pleasant to believe that there is no real malice in the 
w^ay in which most people cut up their friends behind 
their backs. You really have a very kindly feeling 
towards Mr. A. or Mrs. B., though you do turn them into 
ridicule in their absence. After laughing at Mr. A. to 



50 CONCERNING THE 

Mrs. B., you are quite ready to laugh at Mrs. B. to 
Mr. A. The truth appears to be, that all this is an in- 
stance of that reaction which is necessary to human beings. 
In people's presence politeness requires that you should 
put everything that concerns them in the most agreeable 
and favourable way. Impatient of this constraint, you 
revenge yourself upon it whenever circumstances permit, 
by putting things in the opposite fashion. I feel not the 
least enmity towards Mr. Snooks for saying behind my 
back that ray essays are wretched trash. He has fre- 
quently said in my presence that they are far superior to 
anything ever written by Macaulay, Milton, or Shaks- 
peare. I knew that after my dear friend's civility had 
been subjected to so violent a strain as was implied in his 
making the latter declaration, it would of necessity fly 
back, like a released bow, when ever he left me ; and that 
the first mutual acquaintance he met would have the 
satisfaction of hearing the case put in a very different 
way. And no doubt, if my dear friend were put upon 
his oath, his true opinion of me would transpire as nearly 
midway between the two ways of putting it respectively 
before my face and behind my back. 

You are a country clergyman, let us say, my reader, 
with a small parish ; and while you do your duty faith- 
fully and zealously, you spend a spare hour now and then 
upon a review or a magazine article. You like the 
thought that thus, from your remote solitude, you are 
addressing a larger audience than that which you address 
Sunday by Sunday. You think that reasonable and can- 
did people would say that this is an improving and pleas- 
ant way of employing a little leisure time, instead of 
rusting into stupidity or mooning about blankly, or smok- 
ing yourself into vacancy, or reading novels, or listening 



ART OF PUTTING THINGS. 51 

to and retailing gossip, or hanging about the streets of 
the neighbouring county town, or growing sarcastic and 
misanthropic. But don't you remember, my dear friend, 
that although you put the case in this way, it is highly 
probable that some of your acquaintances, whose prof- 
fered contributions to the periodical vi'ith which you are 
supposed to be connected have been ' declined with 
thanks,' and whom malignant editors exclude from the 
opportunity of enlightening an ungrateful world, may 
put the matter very differently indeed ? True, you are 
always thoroughl}^ prepared with your sermon on Sun- 
days, you are assiduous in your care of the sick and the 
aged, you have cottage lectures here and there through- 
out the parish, you teach classes of children and young 
people, you know familiarly the face and the circum- 
stances of every soul of your population, and you hon- 
estly give your heart and strength to your sacred calling, 
suffering nothing whatever to interfere with thai : but do 
you fancy that all this diligence will prevent Miss Lem- 
onjuice and Mr. Flyblow from exclaiming, ' Ah, see Mr. 
Smith ; isn't it dreadful ? See how he neglects his 
proper work, and spends his time, his whole time, in writ- 
ing articles for the Quarterly Eevieiv ! It's disgraceful ! 
The bishop, if he did his duty, would pull him up ! ' 

A striking instance of the effect of skilfully putting 
things may be found in the diary of Warren Hastings. 
The great Governor-General always insisted that his 
conduct of Indian affairs had been just and beneficent, 
and that the charges brought by Burke and Sheridan 
were without foundation in truth. He declared that lie 
had that conviction in the centre of his being ; that he 
was as sure of it as of his own existence. But as he 
listened to the opening speech of Burke, he tells us he 



52 CONCERNING THE 

saw things in a new light. He felt the spell of the way 
in which the great orator put things. Could this really be 
the right way ? ' For half an hour,' says Hastings, ' I 
looked up at Burke in a reverie of wonder, and during 
that time I actually felt myself the most guilty being upon 
earth ! ' But Hastings adds that he did what the boy 
who has played truant does — he took refuge in his own 
way of putting things. ' I recurred to my own heart, and 
there found what sustained me under all this accusation.' 

A young lad's choice of a profession depends mainly 
upon the way in which the life of that profession is put 
before him. If a boy is to go to the bar, it will be expe- 
dient to make the Chancellorship the prominent feature in 
the picture presented to him. It will be better to keep 
in the background the lonely evenings in the chambers at 
the Temple, the weary back-benches in court, the heart- 
sickening waiting year after year. And the first impres- 
sion, strongly rooted, will probably last. I love my own 
profession. 1 would exchange its life and its work for no 
other position on earth ; but I feel that I owe part of its 
fascination to the fragrance of boyish fancies of it which 
linger yet. Blessed be the kind and judicious parent or 
preceptor, whose skilful putting of things long ago has 
given to our vocation, whatever it may be, a charm which 
can overcome the disgust which might otherwise come 
of the hard realities, the little daily worries, the discour- 
agements and frustrated hopes ! How much depends on 
first impressions — on the way in which a man, a place, a 
book is put to us for the first time ! Something of cheer- 
lessness and dreariness will always linger about even the 
summer aspect of the house which you first approached 
when the winter afternoon was closing in, dark, gusty, 
cold, miserable-lookino;. What a difference it makes to 



ART OF PUTTING THINGS. 53 

the little man who is to have a tooth pulled out, whether 
the dentist approaches with a grievous look, in silence, 
with the big forceps conspicuous in his hand ; or conies 
up cheerfully, with no display of steel, and says, with a 
smiling face, ' Come, my little friend, it will be over in a 
moment ; you will hardly have time to feel it ; you will 
stand it like a brick, and mamma will be proud of having 
such a brave little boy ! ' Or, if either man or boy has a 
long task to go through, how much more easily it will be 
done if it is put in separate divisions than if it is set 
before one all in a mass ! Divide et impera states a grand 
principle in the art of putting things. If your servant 
is to clear away a mass of snow, he will do it in half the 
time and with twice the pleasure if you first mark it out into 
squares, to be cleared away one after the other. By the 
make of our being we like to have many starts and many 
arrivals : it does not do to look too far on without a break. 
I remember the driver of a mail-coach telling me, as I 
sat on the box through a sixty mile drive, that it would 
weary him to death to drive that road daily if it were as 
straight as a railway : he liked the turnings and windings, 
which put the distance in the form of successive bits. It 
was sound philosophy in Sydney Smith to advise us, 
whether physically or morally, to ' take short views.' It 
would knock you up at once if, when the railway-carriage 
moved out of the station at Edinburgh, you began to trace 
in your mind's eye the whole route to London. Never do 
that. Think first of Dunbar, then of Newcastle, then of 
York, and putting the thing thus, you will get over the 
distance without fatigue of mind. What little child 
would have heart to begin the alphabet, if, before he 
did so, you put clearly before him all the school and col- 
lege work of which it is the beginning? The poor little 



54 CONCERNING THE 

thing would knock up at once, wearied out by your want 
of skill in putting things. And so it is that Providence, 
kindly and gradually putting things, wiles us onward, still 
keeping hope and heart, through the trials and cares of 
life. Ah, if we had had it put to us at the outset how 
much we should have to go through, to reach even our 
present stage in life, we should have been ready to think 
it the best plan to sit down and die at once ! But, in 
compassion for human weakness, the Great Director and 
Shower of events practises the Art of Putting Things. 
Might we not sometimes do so when we do not? When 
we see some poor fellow grumbling at his lot, and 
shirking his duty, might not a little skill employed in 
putting these things in a proper light serve better than 
merely expressing our contempt or indignation ? A 
single sentence might make him see that what he was 
complaining of was reasonable and right. It is quite 
wonderful from what odd and pervel'se points of view 
people will look at things : and then things look so 
very different. Tlie hill behind your house, which you 
have seen a thousand times, you would not know if you 
approached it from some unwonted quarter. Now, if you 
see a man afflicted with a perverse twist of mind, making 
him put things in general or something in particular in a 
wrong way, you do him a much kinder turn in directing 
him how to put things rightly, than if you were a skilful 
surgeon and cured him of the most fearful squint that 
ever hid behind blue spectacles. 

Did not Franklin go to hear Whitefield preach a char- 
ity sermon resolved not to give a penny ; and was he not 
so thoroughly overcome by the great preacher's way of 
putting the claims of the charity which he was advocat- 
ing, that he ended by emptying his pockets into the plate ? 



ART OF PUTTING THINGS. 00 

I daresay Alexander the Great was somewhat stag- 
gered in his plans of conquest by Parmenio's way of 
putting things. ' After you have conquered Persia, what 
will you do?' 'Then I shall conquer India.' 'After 
you have conquered India, what will you do?' 'Con- 
quer Scythia.' ' And after you have conquered Scythia, 
what will you do ? ' ' Sit down and rest.' ' Well,' said 
Parmenio to the conqueror, ' why not sit down and rest 
now ? ' I trust young Sheridan was proof against his 
father's way of putting things, when the young man said 
he meant to go down a coalpit. ' Why go down a coal- 
pit ! ' said Sheridan the elder. ' Merely to be able to say 
I have been there.' ' You blockhead,' replied the high- 
principled sire, ' what is there to keep you from saying 
so without going ? ' 

I remember witnessing a decided success of the art of 
putting things. A vulgar rich man, who had recently 
bought an estate in Aberdeenshire, exclaimed. ' It is 
monstrous hard ; I have just had this morning to pay 
forty pounds of stipend to the parish minister for my 
property. Now, I never enter the parish church (nor 
any other, he might have added), and why should I pay 
to maintain a Church to which I don't belong?' I omit 
the oaths which served as sauce. Now, that was Mr. 
Oddbody's way of putting things, and you would say his 
case was a hard one. But a quiet man who was present 
changed the aspect of matters. ' Is it not true, Mr. Odd- 
body,' he said, ' that when you bought your estate, its 
rental was reckoned after deducting the payment you 
mention ; that the exact value of your annual payment 
to the minister was calculated, and the amount deducted 
from the price you paid for the property ? And is it not 
therefore true, that not a penny of that forty pounds 



56 CQNCERNINCx THE 

really comes out of your pocket?' Mr. Oddbody's face 
elongated. The bystanders unequivocally signified what 
they thought of him ; and as long as he lived he never 
failed to be remembered as the man who had tried to 
extort sympathy by false pretences. 

To no man is tact in putting things more essential 
than to the clergyman. An injudicious and unskilful 
preacher may so put the doctrines which he sets forth as 
to make them appear revolting and absurd. It is a fear- 
ful thing to hear a stupid fellow preaching upon the doc- 
trine of Election. He may so put that doctrine that he 
shall fill every clever young lad who hears him with prej- 
udices against Christianity, which may last through life. 
And in advising one's parishioners, especially in admin- 
istering reproof where needful, let the parish priest, if he 
would do good, call into play all his tact. With the best 
intentions, through lack of skill in putting things, he may 
do great mischief Let the calomel be concealed beneath 
the jelly. Not that I counsel sneakiness ; that is worse 
than the most indiscreet honesty. There is no need to 
put things, like the Dean immortalized by Pope, who 
when preaching in the Chapel Roj^al, said to his hearers 
that unless they led religious lives they would ultimately 
reach a place ' which he would not mention in so polite 
an assembly.' Nor will it be expedient to put things 
like the contemptible wretch who, preaching before 
Louis XIV., said Nous mourrons tous ; then, turning to 
the king, and bowing humbly, presque tons. And it is 
only in addressing quite exceptional congregations that 
it would now-a-d;iys be regarded as a piece of proper 
respect for the mighty of the earth, were the preacher, in 
stating that all who heard him were sinners, to add, by 
way of reservation, all who have less than a thousand a 
year. 



ART OF HITTING THINGS. 57 

Any man who approaches the matter with a candid 
spirit, must be much struck by the difference between the 
Protestant and the Roman Catholic ways of putting the 
points at issue between the two great Churches. The 
Roman prayers are in Latin, for instance. A violent 
Protestant says that the purpose is to keep the people in 
ignorance. A strong Romanist tells you that Latin was 
the universal language of educated men when these 
prayers were drawn up ; and puts it that it is a fine 
thins: to think that in all Romish churches over Chris- 
tendora the devotions of the people are expressed 
in the selfsame words. Take keeping back the Bible 
from the people. To us nothing appears more flagrant 
than to deprive any man of God's written word. Still 
the Romanist has something to say for himself He puts 
it that there is so much difficulty in understanding much 
of the Bible — that such pernicious errors have followed 
from false interpretations of it. Think, even, of the 
dogma of the infallibility of the Church. The Protes- 
tant puts that dogma as an instance of unheard-of arro- 
gance. The Romanist puts it as an instance of deep 
humility and earnest faith. He says he does not hold 
that the Church, in her own wisdom, is able to keep 
infallibly right ; but he says that he has perfect confi- 
dence that God will not suffer the Church deliberately 
to fall into error. Here, certainly, we have two very 
different ways of putting the same things. 

But who shall say that there are no more than two 
ways of putting any incident, or any opinion, or any char- 
acter ? There are innumerable ways — ways as many 
as are the idiosyncrasies of the men that put them. You 
have to describe an event, have you ? Then you may 
put it in the plain matter-of-fact way, like the Times' re- 



58 CONCERNING THE 

porter ; or in the sublime way, like Milton and Mr. 
Wordy ; or in the ridiculous way, like Punch (of design), 
and Mr. AVordy (unintentionally) ; or in the romantic 
way, like Mr. G. P. R. James ; or in the minutely cir- 
cumstantial way, like Defoe or Poe ; or in the affectedly 
simple way, like Peter Bell; or in the forcible, know- 
ing w^ay, like Macaulay ; or in the genial, manly, good- 
humoured way, like Sydney Smith ; or in the flippant 
way, like Mr. Richard Swiveller, who when he went 
to ask for an old gentleman, inquired as to the health 
of the ' ancient buffalo ; ' or in the lackadaisical way, like 
many young ladies ; or in the whining, grumbling way, 
like many silly people whom it is unnecessary to name ; 
or in the pretentious, lofty way, introducing familiarly 
many titled names without the least necessity, like many 
natives of beautiful Erin. 

What nonsense it is to say, as it has been said, that 
the effect of anything spoken or written depends upon 
the essential thought alone ! Why, nine-tenths of the 
practical power depends on the way in which it is put. 
Somebody has -asserted that any thought which is not elo- 
quent in any words whatever, is not eloquent at all. He 
might as well have said that black was white. Not to 
speak of the charm of the mere music of gracefully mod- 
ulated words, and felicitously arranged phrases, how 
much there is in beautifully logical treatment, and beauti- 
fully clear development, that will interest a cultivated 
man in a speech or a treatise, quite irrespective of its 
subject. I have known a very eminent man say that it 
was a delight to him to hear Foilett make a speech, he 
did not care about wliat. The matter was no matter ; the 
intellectual treat was to w'atch how the great advocate 
put it. And we have all read witli delight stories with 



ART OF PUTTING THINGS. 50 

no incident and little character, yet which derived a 
nameless fascination from the way in which they were 
told. Tell me truly, my fair reader, did you not shed 
some tears over Dickens's story of Richard Doubledick ? 
Could you have read that story aloud without breaking 
down ? And yet, was there ever a story with less in it ? 
But how beautifully Dickens put what little there was, 
and how the melody of the closing sentences of the suc- 
cessive paragraphs lingers on the ear ! And you have 
not forgotten the exquisite touches with which Mrs. 
Stowe put so simple a matter as a mother looking into 
her dead baby's drawer. I have known an attempt at the 
pathetic made on a kindred topic provoke yells of laugh- 
ter; but I could not bear the woman, and hardly the 
man, who could read Mrs. Stowe's putting of that simple 
conception without the reverse of smiles. Many readers, 
too, will not forget how more sharply they have seen 
many places and things, from railway engine sheds to 
the Britannia Bridge, when put by the graphic pen of 
Sir Francis Head. That lively baronet is the master of 
clear, sharp presentment. 

1 have not hitherto spoken of such ways of putting 
things as were practised in King Hudson's railway re- 
ports, or in those of the Glasgow Western Bank, cooked 
to make things pleasant by designed misrepresentation. 
So far we have been thinking of comparatively innocent 
variations in the ways of putting things — of putting the 
best foot foremost in a comparatively honest way. But 
how much intentional misrepresentation there is in Brit- 
ish society ! How few people can tell a thing exactly as 
they saw it ! It goes in one colour, and comes out another, 
like light through tinted glass. It is rather amusing, by 
the way, when a friend comes and tells you a story which 



60 CONCERNING THE 

he heard from yourself, but so put that you hardly know 
it again. Unscrupulous putters of things should have 
good memories. There is no reckoning the ways in 
which, by varying the turn of an expression, by a tone 
or look, an entirely false view may be given of a conver- 
sation, a transaction, or an event. A lady says to her 
cook, You are by no means overworked. The cook com- 
plains in the servants' hall that her mistress said she had 
nothing to do. Lies, in the sense of pure inventions, are 
not common, I believe, among people with any claim to 
respectability ; but it is perfectly awful to think how 
great a part of ordinary conversation, especially in little 
country towns, consists in putting things quite differently 
from the actual fact ; in short, of wilful misrepresentation. 
Many people cannot resist the temptation to deepen the 
colours, and strengthen the lines, of any narration, in order 
to make it more teUing. Unluckily, things usually occur 
in life in such a manner as just to miss what would give 
them a point and make a good story of them ; and the 
temptation is strong to make them, by the deflection of a 
hair's breadth, what they ought to have been. 

It is sad to think, that in ninety-nine out of every hun- 
dred cases in which things are thus untruly put, the rep- 
resentation is made worse than the reality. Few old 
ladies endeavour, by their imaginative putting of things, 
to exhibit their acquaintances as wiser, better, and more 
amiable, than the fact. An exception may be made when- 
ever putting her friends and their aifairs in a dignified 
light would reflect credit upon the old lady herself. Then, 
indeed, their income is vast, their house is magnificent, 
their horses are Eclipses, their conversation is brilliant, 
their attention to their friends unwearying and indescrib- 
able. Alas for our race: that we lean to evil rather than 



ART OF TUTTING THINGS. Gl 

to good, and that it is so much more easy and jiiquant to 
pitch into a man than to praise him ! 

Let us rejoice that there is one happy case in which 
the way of putting things, though often false, is always 
favourable. I mean the accounts which are given in 
country newspapers of the character and the doings of 
the great men of (ho district. I often admire the country 
editor's skill in putting all things (save the speech of the 
opposition M.P., as already mentioned) in such a rosy 
light ; nor do I admire his genial bonhomie less tlian his 
art. If a marquis makes a stammering speech, it is sure 
to be put as most interesting and eloquent. If the rec- 
tor preaches a dull and stupid charity sermon, it is put 
as striking and effective. A public meeting, consisting 
chiefly of empty benches, is put as most respectably 
attended. A gift of a little flannel and coals at Christ- 
mas-time, is put as seasonable munificence. A bald and 
seedy building, just erected in the High-street, is put as 
chaste and classical ; an extravagant display of ginger- 
bread decoration is put as gorgeous and magnificent. In 
brief, what other men heartily wish this world were, the 
conductors of local prints boldly declare that it is. 
Whatever they think a great man would like to be 
called, that they make haste to call him. Happy fellows, 
if they really believe that they live in such a world and 
among such beings as they put ! Their gushing heart 
is too much for even their sharp head, and they see all 
things glorified by the sunshine of their own exceeding 
amiability. 

The subject greatens on me, but the paper dwindles : 
the five-and-forty fair expanses of foolscap are darkened 
at last. It would need a volume, not an essay, to do this 
matter justice. Sir Bulwer Lytton has declared, in 



62 THE ART OF PUTTINCx THINGS. 

pages cbarming but too many, that the world's great 
question is, What will he do with It ? I shall not 
debate the point, but simply add, that only second to that 
question in comprehensive reach and in practical impor- 
tance is the question — How avill he put It ? 



CHAPTER III. 
CONCERNING TWO BLISTERS OF HUMANITY: 

BEING THOUGHTS ON PETTY MALIGNITY AND 
TETTY TRICKERY. 




T is liiglily improbable that any reader of 
ordinary power of imagination, would guess 
the particular surface on which the paper 
is spread whereon I am at the present 
moment writing. Such is the reflection which flows 
naturally from my pencil's point as it begins to darken 
this page. I am seated on a manger, in a very light 
and snug stable, and my paper is spread upon a horse's 
face, occupying the flat part between the eyes. You 
would not think, unless you tried, what an extensive 
superficies may there be found. If you put a thin book 
next the horse's skin, you will write with the greater 
facility: and you will find, as you sit upon the edge of 
the manger, that the animal's head occupies a position 
which, as regards height and slope, is sufliciently con- 
venient. His mouth, it may be remarked, is not far 
from your knees, so that it w^ould be highly inexpedient 
to attempt the operation with a vicious, biting brute, or 
indeed with any horse of whose temper you are not w^ell 
assured. But you, my good Old Boy (for such is the 
quadruped's name), you would not bite your master. 
Too many carrots have you received from his hand ; too 



64 CONCERNING TWO 

many pieces of bread have you licked up from his 
extended pahn. A thought has struck me which I wisii 
to preserve in writing, though indeed at this rate it will 
be a long time before I work my way to it. I am wait- 
ing here for five minutes till my man-servant shall return 
with something for which he has been sent, and where- 
fore should even five minutes be wasted? Life is not 
very long, and the minutes in which one can write with 
ease are not very many. And perhaps the newness of 
such a place of writing may communicate something of 
freshness to what is traced by a somewhat jaded hand. 
You winced a little, Old Boy, as I disposed my book 
and this scrap of an old letter on your face, but now you 
stand perfectly still. On either side of this page I see a 
large eye looking down wistfully ; above the page a pair 
of ears are cocked in quiet curiosity, but with no indica- 
tion of fear. Not that you are deficient in spirit, my 
dumb friend ; you will do your twelve miles an hour 
with any steed within some miles of you ; but a long 
course of kindness has gentled you as well as Mr. Rarey 
could have done, though no more than seven summers 
have passed over your head. Let us ever, kindly reader, 
look with especial sympathy and regard at any inferior 
animal on which the doom of man has fallen, and which 
must eat its food, if not in the sweat of its brow, then in 
that of its sides. Curious, that a creature should be 
called all through life to labour, for which yet there 
remains no rest ! As for us human beings, we can under- 
stand and we can bear with much evil, and many trials 
and sorrows here, because we are taught that all these 
form the discipline which shall prepare us for another 
world, a world that shall set this right. But for you, my 
poor fellow-creature, I think with sorrow as I write here 



BLISTERS OF HUMANITY. 65 

upon your head, there remains no such immortality as 
remains for me. What a difference between us ! You 
to your sixteen or eighteen years here, and then oblivion. 
I to my threescore and ten, and then eternity ! Yes, the 
difference is immense ; and it touches me to think of your 
life and mine, of your doom and mine. I know a house 
where, at morning and evening prayer, when the house- 
hold assembles, among the servants there always walks 
in a certain shaggy little dog, who listens with the 
deepest attention and the most solemn gravity to all that 
is said, and then, when prayers are over, goes out again 
with his friends. I cannot witness that silent procedure 
without being much moved by the sight. Ah, my fel- 
low-creature, this is something in which you have no 
part ! Made by the same Hand, breathing the same air, 
sustained like us by food and drink, you are witnessing 
an act of ours which relates to interests that do not con- 
cern you, and of which you have no idea. And so, here 
we are, you standing at the manger, Old Boy, and I 
sitting upon it ; the mortal and the immortal ; close 
together; your nose on my knee, my paper on your 
head ; yet with something between us broader than the 
broad Atlantic. As for you, if you suffer here, there is 
no other life to make up for it. Yet it would be well if 
many of those who are your betters in the scale of crea- 
tion, fulfilled their Creator's purposes as well as you. 
He gave you strength and swiftness, and you use these 
to many a valuable end : not many of the superior race 
will venture to say that they turn the powers God gave 
them to account as worthy of their nature. If it come 
to the question of deserving, you deserve better than me. 
Forgive me, my fellow-creature, if I have sometimes 
given you an angry flick, when you shied a little at a 



»66 CONCERNING TWO 

pig or a donkey. But I know you bear me no malice ; 
you forget the flicks (they are not many), and you think 
rather of the bread and the carrots, of the times I have 
pulled your ears, and smoothed your neck, and patted 
your nose. And forasmuch as this is all your life, I 
shall do my very best to make it a comfortable one. 
Happiness, of course, is something which you can never 
know. Yet, my friend and companion through many 
weary miles, you shall have a deep-littered stall, and 
store of corn and hay so long as I can give them ; and 
may this hand never write another line if it ever does 
you wilful injury ! 

Into this paragraph has my pencil of its own accord 
rambled, though it was taken up to write about some- 
thing else. And such is the happiness of the writer of 
essays : he may wander about the world of thought at 
his will. The style of the essayist has attained what 
may be esteemed the perfection of freedom, when it per- 
mits him, in writing upon any subject whatsoever, to say 
whatever may occur to him upon any other subject. 
And truly it is a pleasing thing for one long trammelled 
by the Tequirements of a rigorous logic, and fettered by 
thoughts of symmetry, connexion, and neatness in the 
discussion of his topic, to enter upon a fresh field where 
.all these tMngs go for nothing, and to write for readers 
many of whom would never notice such characteristics 
if they were present, nor ever miss them if they were 
absent. There is all the difference between plodding 
wearily along the dusty highway, and rambling through 
green fields, and over country stiles, leisurely, saunter- 
ingly, going nowhere in particular. You would not wish 
to be always desultory and rambling, but it is pleasant to 
be so now and then. And there is a dehghtful freedom 



BLISTERS OF HUMANITY. 67 

about the feeling that you are producing an entirely 
unsymraetrical composition. It is fearful work, if you 
have a thousand thoughts and shades of thought about 
any subject, to get them all arranged in what a logician 
would call their proper places. It is hke having a dis- 
sected puzzle of a thousand pieces given you in confusion, 
and being required to lit all the little pieces of ivory into 
their box again. By most men this work of orderly and 
symmetrical composition can be done well only by its 
being done comparatively slowly. In the case of ordi- 
nary folk the mind is a machine, which may indeed, by 
putting on extra pressure, be worked faster; but the 
result is the deterioration of the material which it turns 
off. It is an extraordinary gift of nature and training, 
when a man is like Follett, who, after getting the facts 
of an involved and intricate case into his mind only at 
one or two o'clock in the morning, could appear in Court 
at nine a.m., and there proceed to state the case and all 
his reasonings upon it, with the very perfection of logical 
method, every thought in its proper place, and all this at 
the rate of rapid extempore speaking. The difference 
between the rate of writing and that of speaking, with 
most men, makes the difference between producing good 
material and bad. A great many minds can turn off a fair 
manufacture at the rate of writing, which, when over- 
driven to keep pace with speaking, will bring forth very 
poor stuff indeed. And besides this, most people cannot 
grasp a large subject in all its extent and its bearings, 
and get their thoughts upon it marshalled and sorted, 
unless they have at least two or three days to do so. At 
first ail is confusion and indefiniteness, but gradually 
things settle into order. Hardly any mind, by any effort, 
can get them into order quickly. If at all, it is by a 



68 CONCERNING TWO 

tremendous exertion ; whereas the mind has a curious 
power, without any perceptible effort, of arranging in 
order thoughts upon any subject, if you give it time. 
Who that has ever written his ideas on some involved 
point but knows this ? You begin by getting up infor- 
mation on the subject about which you are to write. 
You throw into the mind, as it were, a great heap of 
crude, unordered material. From this book and that 
book, from this review and that newspaper, you collect 
the observations of men who have regarded your subject 
from quite different points of view, and for quite different 
purposes ; you throw into the mind cartload after cart- 
load of facts and opinions, with a despairing wonder how 
you will ever be able to get that huge, contradictory, 
vague mass into anything like shape and order. And 
if, the minute you had all your matter accumulated, you 
were called on to state w^hat you knew or thought upon 
the subject, you could not do so for your life in any 
satisfactory manner. You would not know where to 
begin, or how to go on ; it would be all confusion and 
bewilderment. Well, do not make the slightest effort. 
What is impossible now will be quite easy by and bye. 
The peas, which cost a sovereign a pint at Christmas, 
are quite cheap in their proper season. Go about other 
things for three or four days : and at the end of that 
time you will be aware that the machinery of your mind, 
voluntarily and almost unconsciously playing, has sorted 
and arranged that mass of matter wdiich you threw into 
it. Where all was confusion and uncertainty, all is now 
order and clearness ; and you see exactly wdiere to begin, 
and what to say next, and where and how to leave off. 

The probability is, that all this has not been done with- 
out an effort, and a considerable amount of labour. But 



BLISTERS OF HUMANITY. 69 

then, instead of the labour having been all at once, it has 
been very much subdivided. The subject was simmering 
in your mind all the while, though you were hardly aware 
of it. Time after time, you took a little run at it, and 
saw your way a little farther through it. But this multi- 
tude of little separate and momentary efforts does not 
count for much ; though in reality, if they were all put 
together, they would probably be found to have amounted 
to as much as the prolonged exertion which would at a 
single heat have attained the end. A large result, at- 
tained by innumerable little, detached efforts, seems as if 
it had been attained without any effort at all. 

I love a parallel case ; and I must take such cases from 
my ordinary experience. Yesterday, passing a little cot- 
tage by the wayside, I perceived at the door the carcase 
of a very large pig extended on a table. Approaching, 
as is my wont, the tenant of the cottage and owner of the 
pig, I began to converse with him on the size and fatness 
of the poor creature which had that morning quitted its 
sty for ever. It had been shot, he told me ; for such, in 
these parts, is at present the most approved way of secur- 
ing for swine an end as little painful as may be. I ad- 
mired the humanity of the intention, and hoped that it 
might be crowned with success. Then my friend, the pro- 
prietor of the bacon, began to discourse on the philosophy 
of the rearing of pigs by labouring men. No doubt, he 
said, the four pounds, or thereabout, which he would get 
for his pig, would be a great help to a hard-working man 
with five or six little children. But after all, he re- 
marked, it was likely enough that during the months 
of the pig's life, it had bit by bit consumed and cost him 
as much as he would get for it now. But then, he went 
on, it cost us that in little sums we hardly felt ; while the 



70 CONCERNING TWO 

four pounds it will sell for come all in a lump, and seem to 
give a very perceptible profit. Successive unfelt sixpences 
had mounted up to that considerable sum ; even as five 
hundred little unfelt mental eiforts had mounted up to the 
large result of sorting and methodizing the mass of crude 
fact and opinion of which we were thinking a little while 
ago. 

Having worked through this preliminary matter 
(which will probably be quite enough for some readers, 
even as the Solan goose which does but whet the appetite 
of the Highlander, annihilates that of the Sassenach), I 
now come to the subject w^hich was in my mind when I 
began to write on the horse's head. I am not in the sta- 
ble now ; for the business which detained me there is long 
since despatched : and after all, it is more convenient to 
write at one's study-table. I wish to say something con- 
cerning certain evils which press upon humanity ; and 
which are to the feeling of the mind very much what a 
mustard-blister is to the feeling of the body. To the 
healthy man or woman they probably do not do much se- 
rious harm ; but they maintain a very constant irritation. 
They worry and annoy. It is extremely interesting, in 
reading the published diaries of several great and good 
men, to find them recording on how many days they 
were put out of sorts, vexed and irritated, and rendered 
unfit for their work of writing, by some piece of petty 
malignity or petty trickery. How well one can sympa- 
thize with that good and great, and honest and amiable 
and sterling man. Dr. Chalmers, when we find him re- 
cording in his diary, when he was a country parish min- 
ister, how he was unable to make satisfactory progress 
with his sermon one whole forenoon, because some tricky 
and over-reaching farmer in the neighbourhood drove two 



BLISTERS OF HUMANITY. 71 

calves into a field of his glebe, where the great man 
found them in the morning devouring his fine young 
clover! There was something very irritating and annoy- 
ing in the paltry dishonesty. And the sensitive machin- 
ery of the good man's mind could not work sweetly when 
the gritty grains of the small vexation were fretting its 
polished surface. Let it be remarked in passing, that the 
peculiar petty dishonesty of driving cattle into a neigh- 
bouring proprietor's field, is far from being an uncommon 
one. And let me inform such as have suffered from it 
of a remedy against it which has never been known to 
fail. If the trespassing animals be cows, wait till the 
afternoon : then have them well milked, and send them 
home. If horses, let them instantly be put in carts, and 
sent otf ten miles to fetch lime. A sudden strength will 
thenceforward invest your fences ; and from having been 
so open that no efforts on the part of your neighbours 
could keep their cattle from straying into your fields, you 
will find them all at once become wholly impervious. 

But, to return, I maintain that these continual blisters, 
of petty trickery and petty malignity, produce a very 
vexatious effect. You are quite put about at finding out 
one of your servants in some petty piece of dishonesty 
or deception. You are decidedly worried if you happen 
to be sitting in a cottage where your coachman does not 
know that you are ; and if you discern from the window 
that functionary, who never exercises your horses in your 
presence save at a walk, galloping them furiously over 
the hard stones ; shaking their legs and endangering 
their wind. It is annoying to find your haymakers 
working desperately hard and fast when you appear in 
the field, not aware that from amid a little clump of wood 
you had discerned them a minute before reposing quietly 



72 CONCERNING TWO 

upon the fragrant heaps, and possibly that you had over- 
heard them saying that they need not work very hard, as 
they were working for a gentleman. You would not have 
been displeased had you found them honestly resting on 
the sultry day : but you are annoyed by the small attempt 
to deceive you. Such pieces of petty trickery put you 
more out of sorts than you would like to acknowledge : and 
you are likewise a?hamed to discover that you mind so 
much as you do, when some goodnatured friend comes 
and informs you how Mr. Snarling has been misrepre- 
senting something you have said or done ; and Miss 
Limejuice has been telling lies to your prejudice. You 
are a clergyman, perhaps ; and you said in your sermon 
last Sunday that, strong Protestant as you are, you be- 
lieved that many good people may be found in the 
Church of Rome. Well, ever since then. Miss Limejuice 
has not ceased to rush about the parish, exclaiming in 
every house she entered, ' Is not this awful ? Here, on 
Sunday morning, the rector said that we ought all to 
become Roman Catholics ! One comfort is, the Bishop 
is to have him up directly. I was always sure that he 
was a Jesuit in disguise.' Or you are a country gentle- 
man : and at an election-time you told one of your tenants 
that such a candidate was your friend, and that you 
would be happy if he could conscientiously vote for him, 
but that he was to do just what he thought right. Ever 
since, Mr. Snarling has been spreading a report that you 
went, drunk, into your tenant's house, that you thrust 
your fist in his face, that you took him by the collar 
and shook him. that you told him that, if he did not vote 
for your friend, you would turn him out of your farm, 
and send his wife and children to the workhouse. For 
in such playful exaggerations do people in small commu- 



BLISTERS OF HUMANITY. 73 

nities not unfrequently indulge. Now you are vexed 
when you hear of such pieces of petty malignity. They 
don't do you much harm; for most people whose opin- 
ion you value, know how much weight to attach to any 
statement of Miss Limejuice and Mr. Snarling ; and if 
you try to do your duty day by day where God has put 
you, and to live an honest, christian life, it will go hard but 
you will live down such malicious vilification. But these 
things worry. They act as blisters, in short, without the 
medicinal value of blisters. And little contemptible wor- 
ries do a great deal to detract from the enjoyment of life. 
To meet great misfortunes w^e gather up our endurance, 
and pray for Divine support and guidance ; but as for 
small blisters, the insect cares (as James Montgomery 
called them) of daily life, we are very ready to think 
that they are too little to trouble the Almighty with them, 
or even to call up our fortitude to face them. This is not 
a sermon ; but let it be said that whosoever would learn 
how rijzhtly to meet the perpetually-recurring worries of 
workday existence, should read an admirable little trea- 
tise by Mrs. Stowe, the authoress of Uncle Tom's Cabin^ 
entitled Earthly Care a Heavenly Discipline. The price 
of the work is one penny, but it contains advice which is 
worth an uncounted number of pence. Nor, as 1 think, 
are there to be found many more corroding and vexa- 
tious agencies than those which have been already named. 
To know that your servants, or your humbler neigh- 
bours, or your tradespeople, or your tenantry, or your 
scholars, are practising upon you a system of petty de- 
ception ; or to be informed (as you are quite sure to be 
informed) how such and such a mischievous (or perhaps 
only thoughtless) acquaintance is putting words into your 
mouth which you never uttered, or abusing your wife and 



74 CONCERNING TWO 

children, or gloating over yonr failure to get into parlia- 
ment, or the lameness of your horses, or the speech you 
stuck in at the recent public dinner ; — all these things 
are pettily vexatious to many men. No doubt, over-sen- 
sitiveness is abundantly foolish. Some folk appear not 
merely to be thinskinned, but to have been (morally) 
deprived of any skin at all ; and such folk punish them- 
selves severely enough for their folly. They wince when 
any one comes near them. The Pope may go wrong, 
but they cannot. It is treasonable, it is inexpiable sin, 
to hint that, in judgment, in taste, in conduct, it is possible 
for them to deviate by a hair's-breadth from the right 
line of perfection. Indeed, I believe that no immorality, 
no criminality, would excite such wrath in some men, as 
to tread upon a corner of their self-conceit. Yet it is 
curious how little sympathy these over-sensitive people 
have for the sensitiveness of other people. You Avould 
say they fancied that the skin of which they have been 
denuded has been applied to thicken to rhinoceros cal- 
lousness the moral hide of other men. They speak their 
mind freely to their acquaintances of their acquaint- 
ances' belongings. They will tell an acquaintance (they 
have no friends, so I must repeat the word) that he made 
a very absurd speech, that she sung very badly, that the 
situation of his house (which he cannot leave) is abomi- 
nably dull, that his wife is foolish and devoid of accom- 
plishments, that her husband is a man of mediocre abili- 
ties, that her little boy has red hair and a squint, that 
the potatoes he rears are abominably bad, that he is get- 
ting unwieldily stout, that his riding-horse has no hair on 
his tail. All these things, and a hundred more, such 
people say with that mixture of dulness of perception 
and small malignity of nature which go to make what is 



BLISTERS OF HUMANITY. 75 

vulgarly called a person who 'speaks his mind.' The 
right way to meet such folk is by an instant reciprocal 
action. Just begin to speak your mind to them, and see 
how they look. Tell them, with calm politeness, that 
before expressing their opinion so confidently, they 
should have considered what their opinion was worth. 
Tell them that civility requires that you should listen to 
their opinion, but that they may be assured that you will 
act upon your own. Tell them what you think of their 
spelling, their punctuation, their features, their house, 
their carpets, their window-curtains, their general stand- 
ing as members of the human race. How blue they will 
look ! They are quite taken aback when the same petty 
malignity and insolence which they have been accus- 
tomed for years to carry into their neighbours' territory 
is suddenly directed against their own. And you will 
find that not only are they themselves skinlessly sensi- 
tive, but that their sensitiveness is not bounded by their 
own mental and corporeal being ; and that it extends to the 
extreme limits of their horses' legs, to the very top of their 
chimney-pots, to every member of the profession which 
was honored by the choice of their great-grandfiither. 

You have observed, no doubt, that the mention of over- 
sensitive people acted upon the writer's train of thought 
as a pair of points in the rails act upon a railway train. 
It shunted me off the main line ; and in these remarks 
on people who talk their mind, I have been, so to speak, 
running along a siding. To go back to the point where 
I left the line, I observe, that although it is very foolish to 
mind much about such small matters as being a little 
cheated day by day, and a good deal misrepresented now 
and then by amiable acquaintances, still it is the fact that 
even upon people of a healthful temperament such things 



76 CONCERNING TWO 

act as moral blisters, as moral pebbles in one's boots. 
The petty malignity which occasionally annoys you is 
generally to be found among your acquaintances, and 
people of the same standing with yourself; while the 
petty trickery for the most part exists in the case of your 
inferiors. I think one always feels the better for looking 
any small evil of life straight in the face. To define a 
thing, to fix its precise dimensions, almost invariably 
makes it look a good deal smaller. Indefiniteness much 
increases apparent size ; so let us now examine the size 
and the operation of these blisters of humanity. 

As for petty malignity, my reader, have you not seen 
a great deal of it ? There are not many men who appear 
to love their neighbours as themselves. No one enjoys a 
misfortune or disappointment which befals himself: but 
there is too much truth in the smart Frenchman's saying, 
that there is something not entirely disagreeable to us in 
the misfortunes of even our very best friends. The 
malignity, indeed, is petty. It is only in small matters. 
And it is rather in feeling than in action. Even that sour 
Miss Limejuice, though she would be very glad if your 
horse fell lame or your carriage upset, would not see you 
drowning without doing her very best to save you. Ah, 
poor thing ! she is not so bad, after all. This has been to 
her but a bitter world ; and no wonder if she is, on the 
surface, a little embittered by it. But when you get 
fairly through the surface of her nature, as real misfor- 
tunes and trials do, there is kindliness about that withered 
heart yet. She would laugh at you if you broke down in 
your speech on the hustings ; but she would throw herself 
in the path of a pair of furious runaway horses, to save a 
little child from their trampling feet. I do not believe 



BLISTERS OF HUMANITY. 77 

that among ordinary people, even in a gossiping little 
country town, there is much real and serious malice in 
this world. I cling to that belief ; for if many men were 
truly as mischievous as you would sometimes think when 
you hear them talk, one might turn misanthrope and her- 
mit at once. There is hardly a person you know who 
would do you any material injury ; not one who would 
cut down your roses, or splash your entrance-gate with 
mud : not one who would not gladly do you a kind turn if 
it lay within his power. Yet there are a good many who 
would with satisfaction repeat any story which might be a 
little to your disadvantage ; which might tend to prove 
that 3 ou are rather silly, rather conceited, rather ill-in- 
formed. You have various friends who would not object 
to show up any ridiculous mistake you might happen to 
make ; who would never forget the occasion on which it 
appeared that you had never heard of the Spectator or 
Sir Roger de Coverley, or that you thought that Mary 
Queen of Scots was the mother of George III. You 
have various friends who would preserve the remem- 
brance of the day on which the rector rebuked you for 
talking in church ; or on which your partner and yourself 
fell Hat on the floor of the ball-room at the county town 
of Oatmealshire, in the midst of a galop. You have 
various goodnatured friends to whom it would be a positive 
enjoyment to come and tell you what a very unfavour- 
able opinion Mr. A and Mrs. B and Miss C had been 
expressing of your talents, character, and general con- 
duct. How true was the remark of Sir Fretful Plagiary, 
that it is quite unnecessary for any man to take pains to 
learn anything bad that has been said about him, inas- 
much as it is quite sure to be told him by some good- 
natured friend or other ! You have various acquaintances 



78 CONCERNING TWO 

who will be very much gratified when a rainy day spoils 
the pic-nic to which you have invited a large party ; and 
who will be perfectly enraptured, if you have hired a 
steamboat for the occasion, and if the day proves so 
stormy that every soul on board is deadly sick. And 
indeed it is satisfactory to think that in our uncertain 
climate, where so many festal days are marred as to their 
enjoyment by drenching showers, there is compensation 
for the sufferings of the people who are ducked, in the 
enjoyment which that fact affords to very many of their 
friends. By taking a larger view of things, you discover 
that there is good in everything. You were Senior 
Wrangler: you just miss being made a Bishop at forty- 
two. No doubt that was a great disappointment to your- 
self; but think what a joy it was to some scores of 
fellows whom you beat at College, and who hate you 
accordingly. Some months ago a proprietor in this 
county was raised to the peerage. His tenantry were 
entertained at a public dinner in honour of the event. 
The dinner was held in a large canvas pavilion. The 
day came. It was fearfully stormy, and torrents of rain 
fell. A perfect shower-bath was the portion of many of 
the guests ; and finally the canvas walls and roof broke 
loose, smashed the crockery, and whelmed the feast in fear- 
ful ruin. During the nine days which followed, the first 
remark made by every one you met was, ' What a sad 
pity about the storm spoiling the dinner at Stuckup 
Place ! ' And the countenance of every one who thus 
expressed his sorrow was radiant with joy ! And quite 
natural too. They would have felt real regret had the 
new peer been drowned or shot : but the petty malignity 
which dwells in the human bosom made them rejoice at 
the small but irritating misfortune which had befallen. 



BLISTERS OF HUMANITY. 79 

Shall I confess it, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, I re- 
joiced in common with all my fellow-creatnres ! I was 
ashamed of the feeling. I wished to ignore it and extin- 
guish it ; but there was no doubt that it was there. And 
if Lord Newman was a person of enlarged and philosoph- 
ic mind, he would have rejoiced that a small evil, which 
merely mortified himself and gave bad colds to his tenan- 
try, afforded sensible pleasure to several thousands of his 
fellow-men. Yes, my reader : it is well that a certain 
measure of small malice is ingrained in our fallen nature. 
For thus some pleasure comes out of almost all pain ; 
some good from almost all evil. Your little troubles vex 
you, but they gratify your friends. Your horse comes 
down and smashes his knees. No doubt, to you and your 
groom it is unmingled bitterness. But every man within 
several miles, whose horse's knees have already been 
smashed, hails the event as a real blessing to himself. 
You signally fail of getting into Parliament, though you 
stood for a county in which you fancied that your ow^n influ- 
ence and that of your connexions was all-powerful. No 
doubt, you are sadly mortified. No doubt, you do not 
look like yourself for several weeks. But what chuckles 
of joy pervade the hearts and faces of five hundred fel- 
lows who have no chance of getting into the House them- 
selves, and who dislike you for your huge fortune, your 
grand house, your countless thoroughbreds, your insuffer- 
able dignity, and your general forgetfulness of the place 
where you grew, which by those around you is perfectly 
well remembered. And while it is true that even people 
of a tolerably benevolent nature do not really feel any 
great regret at any mortification or disappointment which 
befals a wealthy and pretentious neighbour, it is also 
certain that a greater number of folk do actually gloat 



80 CONCERXIXG TWO 

over any event which humbles the wealthy and preten- 
tious man. You find them, with a malignant look, putting 
the case on a benevolent footing. ' This taking-down 
will do him a great deal of good : he will be much the 
w'iser and better for it.' It is not uncharitable to believe, 
that in many cases in which such sentiments are expressed, 
the true feeling of the speaker is rather one of satisfac- 
tion, at the pain which the disappointment certainly gives, 
than of satisfaction at the beneficial discipline which may 
possibly result from it. The thing said amounts to this : 
' I am glad that Mr. Richman has got a taking-down, be- 
cause the taking-down, though painful at the time, is in 
fact a blessing.' The thing felt amounts to this : ' 1 am 
glad that Mr. Richman has got a taking-down, because I 
know it will make him very miserable.' Every one who 
reads this page knows that this is so. Ah, my malicious ac- 
quaintances, if you know that the sentiment you entertain 
is one that would provoke universal execration if it were 
expressed, does not that show that you ought not to enter- 
tain it ? 

I have said that I do not believe there is much real 
malignity among ordinary men and women. It is only 
at the petty misfortunes of men's friends that they ever 
feel this unamiable satisfaction. When great sorrow be- 
fals a friend, all this unworthy feeling goes ; and the 
heart is filled wdth true sympathy and kindness. A man 
must be very bad indeed if this is not the case. It strikes 
me as something fiend-like rather than human, Byron's 
savage exultation over the melancholy end of the great 
and amiable Sir Samuel Romilly. Romilly had given 
him ottence by acting as legal adviser to some whom By- 
ron regarded as his enemies. But it w^as babyish to 
cherish enmity for such a cause as that ; and it was dia- 



BLISTERS OF HUMANITY. 81 

boHcal to rejoice at the sad close of that life of useful- 
ness and honour. It was not good in James Watt, writ- 
ing in old age an account of one of his many great in- 
ventions, to name very bitterly a man who had pirated 
it ; and to add, with a vengeful chuckle, that the poor 
man was 'afterwards hanged/ No private ground of 
offence should make you rejoice that your fellow-creature 
was hanged. You may justifiably rejoice in such a case 
only when the man hanged was a public offender, and an 
enemy of the race. Throw up your hat, if you please, 
when Nana Sahib stretches the hemp at last ! That is 
all right. He never did harm to you individually : but 
you think of Cawnpore ; and it is quite fit that there 
should be a bitter, burning satisfaction felt at the condign; 
punishment of one whose punishment eternal justice de- 
mands. What is the use of the gallows, if not for that in- 
carnate demon ? I think of the poor sailors who were 
present at the trial of a bloodthirsty pirate of the Cuban 
coast. 'I suppose,' said the one doubtingly to the other, 
' the devil will get that fellow.' ' I should hope so,' was the 
unhesitating reply ; ' or what would be the use of having 
any devil ! ' 

But some real mischievous malice there is, even among 
people who bear a creditable character. I have occasion- 
ally heard old ladies (very few) tearing up the character 
of a friend with looks as deadly as though their weapon 
had been a stiletto, instead of that less immediately fatal 
instrument of offence, concerning which a very high au- 
thority informs us, that in some cases it is ' set on fire of 
hell.' Ah, you poor girl, who danced three times (they 
call it nine) with Mr. A. at the Assembly last night, hap- 
pily you do not know the venomous way in which certain 
spiteful tabbies are pitching into you this morning ! And 
6 



82 CONCERNING TWO 

you, my friend, who drove along Belvidere-place (the 
fashionable quarter of the county town) yesterday, in 
your new drag with the new harness and the pair of 
thoroughbreds, and fancied that you were charming every 
eye and heart, if you could but hear how your equipage 
and yourself were scarified last evening, as several of 
your elderly female acquaintances sipped together the 
cup that cheers ! How they brought up the time that 
you were flogged at the public school, and the term you 
were rusticated at Oxford ! Even the occasion was not 
forgotten on which your grandfather was believed, forty 
years since, to have rather done Mr. Softly in the matter 
of a glandered steed. And the peculiar theological tenets 
of your grandmother were set forth in a fashion that 
would have astounded that good old lady. And you, who 
are so happily occupied in building in that beautiful wood- 
land spot that graceful Ehzabethan house, httle you know- 
how bitterly some folk, dwelling in hideous seedy man- 
sions, sneer at you and your gimcracks, and your Gothic 
style in which you ' go back to barbarism.' You, too, my 
friend, lately made a Queen's counsel, or a judge, or a 
bishop, if the shafts of envy could kill you, you would 
not live long. It is curious, by the way, how detraction 
follows a man when he first attains to any eminent place 
in State or Church; how keenly his quahfications are 
canvassed ; how loudly his unfitness for his situation is 
proclaimed ; and how, when a few months have passed, 
everybody gets quite reconciled to the appointment, and 
accepts it as one of the conditions of human affairs. 
Sometimes, indeed, the right man, by emphasis, is put in 
the right place; so unquestionably the right man that 
even envy is silenced : as when Lord St. Leonards was 
made Lord Chancellor, or when Mr. Melvill was ap- 



BLISTERS OF HUMANITY. 83 

pointed to preach before the House of Commons. But 
even when men who have been plucked at the University- 
were made bishops, or princes who had never seen a 
gun fired in anger field-marshals, or briefless barristers 
judges, although a general outcry arose at the time, it very 
speedily died away. When you find a man actually in a 
place, you do not weigh his claims to be there so keenly 
as if you were about to appoint him to it. If a resolute 
premier made Tom Spring a chief-justice, I doubt not 
that in six weeks the country would be quite accustomed 
to the fact, and accept it as part of the order of nature. 
How else is it that the nation is content to have blind and 
deaf generals placed in high command, and infirm old ad- 
mirals going to sea who ought to be going to bed ? 

It is a sad fact that there are men and women who will, 
without much investigation as to its truth, repeat a story 
to the prejudice of some man or woman whom they know. 
They are much more critical in weighing the evidence in 
support of a tale to a friend's credit and advantage. I do 
not think they would absolutely invent such a calumnious 
narrative ; but they will repeat, if it has been told them, 
what, if they do not know it to be false, they also do not 
know to be true, and strongly suspect to be false. 

My friend Mr. C, rector of a parish in Hampshire, has 
a living of about five hundred a year. Some months ago 
he bought a horse, for which he paid fifty pounds. Soon 
after he did so, I met a certain malicious woman who 
lived in his neighbourhood. ' So,' said she, with a look far 
from benevolent, ' Mr. C. has gone and paid a hundred 
pounds for a horse ! Monstrous extravagance for a man 
with his means and with a family.' 'No, Miss Verjuice/ 
I replied : ' Mr. C. did not pay nearly the sum you men- 
tion for his horse : he paid no more for it than a man 



84 CONCERNING TWO 

of his means could afford.' Miss Verjuce was not in the 
least discomfited by the failure of her first shaft of petty 
malignity. She had another in her quiver which she in- 
stantly discharged. ' Well,' said she, with a face of deadly 
ferocity, * if Mr. C. did not pay a hundred pounds for his 
horse, at all events he said he did I ' This was the drop 
too much. I told Miss Verjuice, with considerable as- 
perity, that my friend was incapable of petty vapouring 
and petty falsehood ; and in my book, from that day for- 
ward, there has stood a black cross against the individu- 
al's name. 

Egypt, it seems, is the country where malevolence in 
the sense of pure envy of people who are better off, is 
most prevalent and is most feared. People there believe 
that the envious eye does harm to those on whom it 
rests. Thus, they are afraid to possess fine houses, 
furniture, and horses, lest they should excite envy and 
bring misfortune. And when they allow their children 
to go out for a walk, they send them dirty and ill-dressed, 
for fear the covetous eye should injure them: — 

At the bottom of this superstition is an enormous prevalence of 
env}^ among the lower Egyptians. You see it in all their fictions. 
Half of the stories told in the coffee-shops by the professional story- 
tellers, of which the Arabian Nights are a specimen, turn on malevo- 
lence. Malevolence, not attributed, as it would be in European 
fiction, to some insult or injury inflicted by the person Avho is its 
object, but to mere envy: envy of wealth, or of the other means of 
enjoyment, honourably acquired and liberally used.* 

A similar envy, no doubt, occasionally exists in this 
country; but people here are too enlightened to fancy 
that it can do them any harm. Indeed, so far from 
standing in fear of exciting envy by their display of 
possessions and advantages, some people feel much grati- 

* Archbishop Whately's Bacon, p. 97. 



BLISTERS OF HUMANITY. 85 

fied at the thought of the amount of envy and malignity 
which they are likely to excite. ' Wont old Hunks turn 
green with fury,' said a friend to me, ' the first time I 
drive up to his door with those horses ? ' They were 
indeed beautiful animals ; but their proi)rietor appeared 
to prize them less for the pleasure they afforded himself, 
than for the mortification they would inflict on certain of 
his neighbours. 'Wont Mrs. Grundy burst with spite 
when she sees this drawing-room?' was the remark of 
my lately-married cousin Henrietta, when she showed 
me that very pretty apartment for the first time. 'Wont 
Snooks be ferocious,' said Mr. Dryasdust the book-col- 
lector, 'when he hears that I have got this almost unique 
edition ? ' Ah, my fellow-creatures, we are indeed a 
fallen race ! 

Hazlitt maintains that the petty malignity of mortals 
finds its most striking field in the matter of will-making. 
He says : 

The last act of our lives seldom belies the former tenor of them for 
stupidity, caprice, and unmeaning spite. All that we seem to think 
of is to manage matters so (in settling accounts Avith those who are 
so unmannerly as to survive us) as to do as little good and plague 
and disappoint as many people as possible.* 

• Every one knows that this brilliant essayist was 
accustomed to deal in sweeping assertions ; and it is to 
be hoped that such cases as that which he here describes 
form the exception to the rule. But it must be admitted 
that most of us have heard of wills at whose reading we 
might almost imagine their malicious maker fancied he 
might be invisibly present to chuckle over the disap- 
pointment and mortification which he was dealing even 
from his grave. Cases are also recorded in which rich 

* Table-Talk, vol. i. p. 171. 'Essay on Will-making.' 



86 CONCERNING TWO 

old bachelors have played upon the hopes of half a dozen 
poor relations, by dropping hints to each separately that 
he was to be the fortunate heir of all their wealth ; and 
then have left their fortune to an hospital, or have de- 
parted from this world intestate, leaving an inheritance 
mainly of quarrels, heart-burnings, and Chancery suits. 
How often the cringing, tale-bearing toady, who has 
borne the ill-humours of a rich sour old maid for thirty 
years, in the hope of a legacy, is cut off with nineteen 
guineas for a mourning ring ! You would say perhaps, 
* Serve her right.' I differ from you. If any one hkes 
to be toadied, he ought in honesty to pay for it. He 
knows quite well he would never have got it save for 
the hope of payment ; and you have no more right to 
swindle some poor creature out of years of cringing and 
flattering than out of pounds of money. A very odd 
case of petty malice in will-making was that of a man 
who, not having a penny in this world, left a will in 
which he bequeathed to his friends and acquaintance 
large estates in various parts of England, money in the 
funds, rings, jewels, and plate. His inducement was the 
prospect of the delight of his friends at first learning 
about the rich possessions which were to be theirs, and 
then the bitter disappointment at finding how they had 
been hoaxed. Such deceptions and hoaxes are very 
cruel. Who does not feel for poor Moore and his wife, 
receiving a lawyer's letter just at a season of special 
embarrassment, to say that some deceased admirer of the 
poet had left him five hundred pounds, and, after being 
buoyed up with hope for a few days, finding that some 
malicious rascal had been playing upon them ! No; poor 
people know that want of money is too serious a matter 
to be joked about. 



BLISTERS OF HUIMANITY. 87 

Let me conclude what I have to say about petty 
malignity by observing that I am very far from main- 
taining that all unfavourable remark about people you 
know proceeds from this unamiable motive. Some folk 
appear to fancy that if you speak of any man in any 
terms but those of superlative praise, this must be be- 
cause you bear him some ill-will : they cannot understand 
that you may merely wish to speak truth and do justice. 
Every person who writes a stupid book and finds it 
unfavourably noticed in any review, instantly concludes 
that the reviewer must be actuated by some petty spite. 
The author entirely overlooks the alternative that his 
book may be said to be bad because it is bad, and be- 
cause it is the reviewer's duty to say so if he thinks so. 
I remember to have heard the friend of a lady who had 
published a bitterly bad and unbecoming work speaking 
of the notice of it which had appeared in a periodical of 
the very highest class. The notice was of course unfa- 
vourable. ' Oh,' said the writer's friend, ' I know why 
the review was so disgraceful: the man who wrote it 
was lately jilted, and he hates all women in consequence ! ' 
It happened that I had very good reason to know who 
wrote the depreciatory article, and I could declare that 
the motive assigned to the reviewer had not the least 
existence in fact. 

Unfavourable remark has frequently no earthly con- 
nexion with malignity great or petty. It is quite fit that, 
as in people's presence politeness requires that you should 
not say what you think of them, you should have an 
opportunity of doing so in their absence ; and every one 
feels when the limits of fair criticism are passed. What 
could you do if, after listening with every appearance of 
interest to some old lady's wearisome vapouring, you 
felt bound to pretend, after you had made your escape, 



88 CONCERNING TWO 

that you thought her conversation was exceedingly inter- 
esting ? What a relief it is to tell what you have suf- 
fered to some sympathetic friend ! I have heard injudi- 
cious people say, as something much to a man's credit, 
that he never speaks of any mortal except in his praise. 
I do not think the fact is to the man's advantage. It 
appears to prove either that the man is so silly that he 
thinks everything he hears and sees to be good, or that 
he is so crafty and reserved that he will not commit him- 
self by saying what he thinks. Outspoken good-nature 
will sometimes get into scrapes from which self-contained 
craft Avill keep free ; but the man who, to use Miss 
Edgeworth's phrase, ' thinks it best in general not to 
speak of things,' will be liked by nobody. 

By petty trickery I mean that small deception which 
annoys and worries you, without doing you material 
harm. Thus it passes petty trickery when a bank pub- 
lishes a swindling report, on the strength of whose false 
representations of prosperity you invest your hard-won 
savings in its stock and lose them all. It passes petty 
trickery when your clerk absconds with some hundreds 
of pounds. It indicates petty trickery when you find 
your servants writing their letters on your crested note- 
paper, and enclosing them in your crested envelopes. It 
indicates that at some time or other a successful raid has 
been made upon your paper-drawer. It indicates petty- 
trickery when you find your horses' ribs beginning to be 
conspicuous, though they are only half worked and are 
allowed three feeds of corn a day. Observe your coach- 
man then, my friend. Some of your corn is going 
where it should not. It indicates petty trickery when 
your horses' coats are full of dust, though whenever you 
happen to be present they are groomed with incredible 
vigour: they are not so in your absence. It indicates 



BLISTERS OF HUMANITY. 89 

petty trickery when, suddenly turning a corner, you find 
your coachman galloping the horses along the turnpike- 
road at the rate of twenty-three miles an hour. It indi- 
cates petty trickery when you find your neighbours' cows 
among your clover. It indicates petty trickery when you 
find amid a cottager's stock of firewood several palisades 
taken from your park-fence. It indicates petty trickery 
when you discern in the morning the traces of very 
large hobnailed shoes crossing your wife's flower-garden 
towards the tree where the magnum bonums are nearly 
ripe. But why extend the catalogue ? Every man can 
add to it a hundred instances. Says Bacon, ' The small 
wares and petty points of cunning are infinite, and it 
were a good deed to make a list of them.' Who could 
make such a list ? What numbers of people are practis- 
ing petty trickery at every hour of the day ! Yet, foras- 
much as these tricks are small and pretty frequently seen 
through, they form only a blister: they are irritating but 
not dangerous : and it is very irritating to know that you 
have been cheated, to however small an extent. How 
inestimable is a thoroughly honest servant ! Apart from 
anything like principle, if servants did but know it, it is 
well worth their while to be strictly truthful and reliable : 
they are then valued so much. It is highly expedient, 
besides being right. And not only is it extremely vex- 
atious to find out any domestic in dishonesty of any kind ; 
not only does it act as a blister at the moment, but it fos- 
ters in one's self a suspicious habit of mind which has in 
it something degrading. It is painful to be obliged to 
feel that you must keep a strict watch upon your stable 
or your granary. You have somewhat of the feeling 
of a spy; yet you cannot, if you have ordinary powers 
of observation, shut your eyes to what passes round 
you. 



90 CONCERNING TWO 

There is, indeed, some petty trickery which is highly 
venial, not to say pleasing. When a little child, on 
being offered a third plate of plum-pudding, says, with 
a wistful, and half-ashamed look, * No, thank you,' well 
you know that the statement is not entirely candid, and 
that the poor little thing would be sadly disappointed if 
you took him at his word. Think of your own childish 
days ; think what plum-pudding was then, and instantly 
send the little man a third plate, larger than the pre- 
vious two. So if your gardener gets wet to the skin in 
mowing a little bit of turf, in a drenching summer- 
shower, which turns it, parched for the last fortnight, to 
emerald green, tell him he must be very wet, and give him 
a glass of whisky ; never mind, though he, in his polite- 
ness, declares that he does not want the whisky, and is 
perfectly dry and comfortable. You will find him very 
readily dispose of the proffered refreshment. So if you 
go into a poor, but spotlessly-clean little cottage, where a 
lonely widow of eighty sits by her spinning-wheel. Her 
husband and her children are dead, and there she is, all 
alone, waiting till she goes to rejoin them. A poor, dog's- 
eared, ill-printed Bible lies on the rickety deal-table 
near. You take a large parcel which you have brought, 
wrapped in brown paper ; and as you talk with the good 
old Christian, you gradually untie it. A well-sized vol- 
ume appears ; it is the Volume which is worth all the 
rest that ever were written ; and you tell your aged 
friend that you have brought her a Bible, with great, 
clear type, which will be easily read by her failing eyes, 
and you ask her to accept it. You see the flush of joy 
and gratitude on her face, and you do not mind though 
she says something which is not strictly true — that it 
was too kind of you, that she did not need it, that she 
could manage with the old one yet. Nor would you 



BLISTERS OF HUMANITY. 91 

severely blame the brave fellow who jumped off a bridge 
forty feet high, and pulled out your brotlier when he was 
just sinking in a flooded river, if, when you thanked him 
with a full heart for the risk he had run, he replied, in a 
careless, good-humoured way, that he had really done 
nothing worth the speaking of. The brave man is 
pained by your thanks : but he thought of his wife and 
children when he leaped from the parapet, and he knew 
well that he was hazarding his life. And he is perfectly 
aware that the statement which he makes is not consis- 
tent with fact — but surely you would never call him a 
trickster ! 

Mr. J. S. Mill, unquestionably a very courageous as 
well as a very able writer, has declared in a recent publi- 
cation, that, in Great Britain, the higher classes, for the 
most part, speak the truth, while the lower classes, almost 
without exception, have frequent recourse to falsehood. 
I think Mr. Mill must have been unfortunate in his 
experience of the poor. I have seen much of them, and 
I have found among them much honesty and truthfulness, 
along with great kindness of heart. They have little to 
give away in the form of money, but will cheerfully give 
their time and strength in the service of a sick neigh- 
bour. I have known a shepherd who had come in from 
the hills in the twilight of a cold December afternoon, 
weary and worn out, find that the little child of a poor 
widow in the next cottage had suddenly been taken ill, 
and without sitting down, take his stick, and walk away 
through the dark to the town nine miles off, to fetch the 
doctor. And when I told the fine fellow how much I 
respected his manly kindness, 1 found he was quite un- 
aware that he had done anything remarkable ; ' it was just 
what ony neibour wad do for anither ! ' And I could 



92 CONCERNING TWO 

mention scores of similar cases. And as for truthfulness, 
I have known men and women among the peasantry, 
both of England and Scotland, whom I would have 
trusted with untold gold — or even with what the High- 
land laird thought a more searching test of rectitude — 
with unmeasured whisky. Still, I must sorrowfully 
admit that I have found in many people a strong tendency, 
when they had done anything wrong, to justify them- 
selves by falsehood. It is not impossible that over-severe 
masters and mistresses, by undue scoldings administered 
for faults of no great moment, foster this unhappy ten- 
dency. It was not, however, of one class more than 
another, that the quaint old minister of a parish in Lan- 
arkshire was speaking, when one Sunday morning he 
read as his text the verse in the Psalms, ' I said in my 
haste, All men are liars,' and began his sermon by 
thoughtfully saying : — 

' Aye, David, ye said it in your haste, did you ? If 
ye had lived in this parish, ye might have said it at your 
leisure ! ' 

There is hardly a sadder manifestation of the spirit of 
petty trickery than that which has been pressed on the 
attention of the public by recent accounts of the adulter- 
ation of food. It is, indeed, sad enough. 

When chalk, and alum, and plaster, are sold to the poor for bread, 
And the spirit of murder works in the very means of life : 

and w^hen the luxuries of the rich are in many cases 
quite as much tampered with ; while, when medical 
appliances become needful to correct the evil effects of 
red lead, plaster of Paris, cantharides, and oil of vitriol, 
the physician is quite uncertain as to the practical power 



BLISTERS OF HUMANITY. - 93 

of the medicine he prescribes, inasmuch as drugs are as 
much adulterated as food. Still, there seems reason to 
hope that, more frequently than the Lancet Commission 
would lead one to think, you really get in the shops the 
thing you ask and pay for. I firmly believe that, in this 
remote district of the world, such petty dishonesty is 
unknown : and I cannot refrain from saying that, notwith- 
standing all I have read of late years in tracts, sermons, 
poems, and leading articles, of the frequency of fraud in 
the dealings of tradesmen in towns, I never in my own 
experience have seen the least trace of it. 

Most human beings, however, will tell you that day 
by day they witness a good deal of indirectness, insincer- 
ity, and want of straightforwardness — in fact, of petty 
trickery. There are many people who appear incapa- 
ble of doing anything without going round about the 
bush, as Caledonians say. There are many people who 
always try to disguise the real motive for what they do. 
They will tell you of anything but the consideration that 
actually weighs with them, though that is in most cases 
perfectly well known to the person they are talking to. 
Some men will tell you that they travel second-class by 
railway because it is warmer, cooler, airier, pleasanter 
than the first-class. They suppress all mention of the 
consideration that obviously weighs with them, viz., that 
it is cheaper. Mr. Squeers gave the boys at Dotheboys 
Hall treacle and sulphur one morning in the week. The 
reason he assiojned was that it was good for their health : 
but his more outspoken wife stated the true reason, which 
was that, by sickening the children, it made breakfast 
unnecessary upon that day. Some Dissenters pretend 
that they want to abolish Church-rates, with a view to the 
good of the Church : of course everybody knows that 



94 CONCERNING TWO 

their real wish is to do the Church harm. Very soft 
indeed would the members of the Church be, if they 
believed that its avowed enemies are extremely anxious 
for its welfare. But the forms of petty trickery are end- 
less. Bacon mentions in one of his Essays that he knew 
a statesman who, when he came to Queen Elizabeth with 
bills to sign, always engaged her in conversation about 
something else, to distract her attention from the papers 
she was signing. And when some impudent acquaint- 
ance asks you, reader, to put your name to another 
kind of bill, for his advantage, does he not always think 
to delude you into doing so by saying that your signing is 
a mere form, intended only for the fuller satisfaction of 
the bank that is to lend him the money ? He does not 
tell you that he is just asking you to give him the sum 
named on that stamped paper. Don't believe a word he 
says, and show him the door. Signing a promise to pay 
money is never a form ; if it be a form, why does he ask 
you to do it ? Bacon mentions another man, who ' when 
he came to have speech, would pass over that he 
intended most, and go forth, and come back again, and 
speak of it as a thing he had almost forgot.' I have 
known such men too. We have all known men who 
would come and talk about many indifferent things, and 
then at the end bring in as if accidentally the thing 
they came for. Always pull such men sharply up. Let 
them understand that you see through them. When they 
sit down, and begin to talk of the weather, the affairs of 
the district, the new railway, and so forth, say at once, 
' Now, Mr. Pawky, I know you did not come to talk to 
me about these things. What is it you want to speak of ? 
I am busy, and have no time to waste.' It is wonderful 
how this will beat down Mr. Pawky's guard. He is pre- 



BLISTERS OF HUMANITY. 95 

pared for sly finesse, but he is quite taken abacli by down- 
riglit honesty. If you try to do him, he will easily do 
you : but perfect candour foils the crafty man, as the sturdy 
Highlander's broadsword at once cut down the French 
master of fence, vapouring away with his rapier. Tou 
cannot beat a rogue with his own weapons. Try him 
with truth : like David, he ' has not proved ' that armour ; 
he is quite unaccustomed to it, and he goes down. 

Men in towns know that time is valuable to them ; and 
by long experience they are assured that there is no use 
in trying to overreach a neighbour in a bargain, because 
he is so sharp that they will not succeed. But in agri- 
cultural districts some persons may be found who appear 
to regard it as a fond delusion that ' honesty is the best 
policy;' and who never deal with a stranger without 
feeling their way, and trying how far it may be possible 
to cheat him. I am glad to infer, from the universal 
contempt in which such persons are held, that they form 
base, though by no means infrequent, exceptions to the 
general rule. The course which such individuals follow 
in buying and selling is quite marked and invariable. If 
they wish to buy a cow or rent a field, they begin by 
declaring with frequency and vehemence that they don't 
want the thing, — that in fact they would rather not 
have it, — that it would be inconvenient for them to 
become possessors of it. They then go on to say that 
still, if they can get it at a fair price, they may be 
induced to think of it. They next declare that the cow 
is the very worst that ever was seen, and that very few 
men would have such a creature in their possession. The 
seller of the cow, if he knows his customer, meanwhile 
listens with entire indifference to Mr. Pawky's assevera- 
tions, and after a while proceeds to name his price. 



96 CONCERNING TWO 

Fifteen pounds for the cow. ' Oh,' says Mr. Pawky, 
getting up liastily and putting on his hat, ' I see you don't 
want to sell it. I was just going to have offered you five 
pounds. I see I need not spend longer time here.' Mr. 
Pawky, however, does not leave the room : sometimes, 
indeed, if dealing with a green hand, he may actually 
depart for half an hour ; but then he returns and resumes 
the negotiation. A friend of his has told him that possi- 
bly the cow was better than it looked. It looked very 
bad indeed ; but it might be a fair cow after all. So the 
proceedings go on : and after an hour's haggling, and 
several scores of falsehoods told by Mr. Pawky, he 
becomes the purchser of the animal for the sum origi- 
nally named. Even now he is not exhausted. He assures 
the former owner of the cow that it is the custom of the 
district always to give back half-a-crown in the pound, 
and refuses to hand over more than £13 2s. 6d. The 
cow is by this time on its way to Mr. Pawky 's farm. If 
dealing with a soft man, this final trick possibly succeeds. 
If with an experienced person, it wholly fails. And Mr. 
Pawky, after wasting two hours, telling sixty-five lies, 
and stamping himself as a cheat in the estimation of the 
person with whom he was dealing, ends by taking noth- 
ing by all his petty trickery. Oh, poor Pawky, why not 
be honest and straightforward at once ? You would get 
just as much money, in five cases out of six ; and you 
w^ould save your time and breath, and miss running up 
that fearful score in the book of the recording angel ! 

After any transaction with Mr- Pawky, how delightful 
it is to meet with a downright honest man ! I know 
several men — farmers, labourers, country gentlemen — 
of that noble class, whose ' word is as good as their bond !' 
I know men whom you could not even imagine as taking 



BLISTERS OF HUMANITY. 97 

a petty advantage of any mortal. They are probably far 
from being pieces of perfection. They are crotchety in 
temper ; they are rough in address ; their clothes were 
never made by Stultz ; possibly they do not shave every 
morning. But as I look at the open, manly face, and 
feel the strong gripe of the vigorous hand, and rejoice to 
think that the world goes well with them, and that they 
find it pay to speak the truth, — I feel for the minute as 
if the somewhat overstrained sentiment had truth in it, 

that 

An honest man's the noblest work of God ! 

I am firmly convinced that no man, in the long run, 
gains by petty trickery. Honesty is the best policy. 
You remember how the roguish Ephraim Jenkinson, in 
the Vicar of Wakefield, mentioned that he contrived to 
cheat honest Farmer Flamborough about once a year ; 
but still the honest farmer grew rich, and the rogue grew 
poor, and so Jenkinson began to bethink him that he was 
in the wrong track after all. A man who with many 
oaths declares a brokenwinded nag is sound as a bell, 
and thus gets fifty pounds for an animal he bought for 
ten, and then declares with many more oaths that he 
never warranted the horse, may indeed gain forty pounds 
in money by that transaction, but he loses much more 
than he gains. The man whom he cheated, and the 
friends of the man whom he cheated, will never trust him 
again ; and he soon acquires such a character that every 
one who is compelled to have any dealings with him 
stands on his guard and does not believe a syllable he 
says. I do not mention here the solemn consideration of 
how the gain and loss may be adjusted in the view of an- 
other world ; nor do more than allude to a certain solemn 
question as to the profit which would follow the gain of 
7 



98 CONCERNING TWO 

much more than forty pounds, by means which would 
damage something possessed by every man. All trickery 
is folly. Every rogue is a fool. The publisher who 
advertises a book he has brought out, and appends a 
flattering criticism of it as from the Times or Fraser's 
Magazine which never appeared in either periodical, does 
not gain on the whole by such petty deception ; neither 
does the publisher who appends highly recommendatory 
notices, marked with inverted commas as quotations, 
though with the name of no periodical attached, the fact 
being that he composed these notices himself You will 
say that Mr. Barnum is an instance of a man who made 
a large fortune by the greater and lesser arts of trickery ; 
but would you, my honest and honourable friend, have 
taken that fortune on the same terms? I hope not. 
And no blessing seems to have rested on Barnum's gains. 
Where are they now ? The trickster has been tricked 
— the doer done. There is a hollo wness about all pros- 
perity which is the result of unfair and underhand 
means. Even if a man who has grown rich through 
trickery seems to be going on quite comfortably, depend 
upon it he cannot feel happy. The sword of Damocles is 
hanging over his head. Let no man be called happy 
before he dies. 

I believe, indeed, that in some cases the conscience 
grows quite callous, and the notorious cheat fancies him- 
self a highly moral and religious man ; and although it 
is always extremely irritating to be cheated, it is more 
irritating than usual to think that the man who has 
cheated you is not even made uneasy by the checks of 
his own conscience. I would gladly think that in most 

cases, 

Doubtless the pleasure is as great 
Of being cheated as to cheat. 



BLISTERS OF HUMANITY. 99 

I would gladly think that the man who has done 
another feels it as blistering to remember the fact as the 
man who has been done does. It would gratify me 
much if I were able to conclude that every man who is a 
knave knows that he is one. I doubt it. Probably he 
merely thinks himself a sharp, clever fellow. Only this 
morning I was cheated out of four and sixpence by a 
man of very decent appearance. He obtained that sum 
by making three statements, which I found on inquiring, 
after he had gone, were false. The gain, you see, was 
small. He obtained just eighteenpence a lie. Yet he 
went off, looking extremely honest. And no doubt he 
will be at his parish church next Sunday, shaking his head 
sympathetically at the more solemn parts of the sermon. 
And probably, when he reflects upon the transaction, he 
merely thinks that he was sharp and I was soft. The 
analogy between these small tricks and a blister holds in 
several respects. Each is irritating, and the irritation 
caused by each gradually departs. You are very indig- 
nant at first learning that you have been taken in ; you 
are rather sore, even the day after, — but the day after 
that you are less sore at having been done than sorry for 
the rogue who w^as fool enough to do you. 

I am writing only of that petty trickery wdiich acts as 
a blister of humanity ; as I need say nothing of those 
numerous forms of petty trickery which do not irritate, 
but merely amuse. Such are those silly arts by which 
some people try to represent themselves to their fellow- 
creatures as richer, wiser, better-informed, more highly 
connected, more influential and more successful than the 
fact. I felt no irritation at the schoolboy who sat oppo- 
site me the other day in a railway carriage, and pretend- 
ed that he was reading a Greek play. I allowed him to 



100 CONCERNING TWO BLISTERS OF HUMANITY. 

fancy his trick liad succeeded, and conversed with him of 
the characteristics of ^schylns. He did not know much 
about them. A friend of mine, a clergyman, went to the 
house of a weaver in his parish. As he was about to 
knock at the door, he heard a solemn voice within ; and 
he listened in silence as the weaver asked God's blessing 
upon his food. Then he lifted the latch and entered : 
and thereupon the weaver, resolved that the clergyman 
should know he said grace before meat, hegcm and re- 
peated his grace over again. My friend was not angry ; 
but he was very, very sorry. And never, till the man 
had been years in his grave, did he mention the fact. 
As for the fashion in which some people fire off, in con- 
versation with a new acquaintance, every titled name 
they know, it is to be recorded that the trick is invaria- 
bly as unsuccessful as it is contemptible. And is not a 
state dinner, given by poor people, in resolute imitation 
of people with five times their income, with its sham 
champagne, its disguised greengrocers, and its general 
turning the house topsy-turvy, — is not such a dinner 
one great trick, and a very transparent one? 

The writer is extremely tired. Is it not curious that 
to write for four or five hours a day for four or five suc- 
cessive days, wearies a man to a degree that ten or 
twelve daily hours of ploughing does not weary the man 
whose work is physical ? Mental work is much the 
greater stretch : and it is strain, not time, that kills. A 
horse that walks at two miles and a half an hour, plough- 
ing, will work twelve hours out of the twenty-four. A 
horse that runs in the mail at twelve miles an hour, 
works an hour and a half and rests twenty-two and a 
half; and with all that rest soon breaks down. The bear- 
ing of all this is, that it is time to stop ; and so, my long 
black goosequill, lie down ! 




CHAPTER IV. 
CONCERNING WORK AND PLAY. 

OBODY likes to work. I should never 
work at all if I could help it. I mean, when 
I say that nobody likes work, that nobody 
does so whose tastes and likings are in a 
natural and unsophisticated condition. Some men, by long 
training and by the force of various circumstances, do, I 
am aware, come to have an actual craving, a morbid ap- 
petite, for work ; but it is a morbid appetite, just as truly 
as that which impels a lady to eat chalk, or a child to 
prefer pickles to sugar-plums. Or if my reader quarrels 
with the word niorhid, and insists that a liking for brisk, 
hard work is a healthy taste and not a diseased one, I 
will give up that phrase, and substitute for it the less 
strong one that a liking for work is an acquired taste, like 
tliat which leads you and me, my friend, to like bitter 
beer. Such a man, for instance, as Lord Campbell, has 
brought himself to that state that I have no doubt he 
actually enjoys the thought of the enormous quantity of 
work which he goes through ; but when he does so he 
does a thing as completely out of nature as is done by the 
Indian fakir, who feels a gloomy satisfaction as he reflects 
on the success with which he has laboured to weed out all 



102 CONCERNING 

but bitterness from life. I know quite well that we can 
bring ourselves to such a state of mind that we shall feel 
a sad sort of pleasure in thinking how much we are 
taking out of ourselves, and how much we are deny- 
ing ourselves. What college man who ever worked him- 
self to death but knows well the curious condition of 
mind ? He begins to toil, induced by the love of knowl- 
edge, or by the desire of distinction ; but after he has 
toiled on for some weeks or months, there gradually steals 
in such a feeling as that which I have been describing. 
I have felt it myself, and so know all about it. I do 
not believe that any student ever worked harder than I 
did. And I remember well the gloomy kind of satisfac- 
tion I used to feel, as all day, and much of the night, I 
bent over my books, in thinking how much I was fore- 
going. The sky never seemed so blue and so inviting as 
when I looked at it for a moment now and then, and so 
back to the weary page. And never did the green wood- 
land walks picture themselves to my mind so freshly and 
delightfully as when I thought of them as of something 
which I was resolutely denying myself. I remember 
even now, when I went to bed at half-past four in the 
morning, having risen at half-past six the previous morn- 
ing, and having done nearly as much for months, how I 
was positively pleased to see in the glass the ghastly 
cheeks, and the deep black circles round the eyes. There 
is, I repeat, a certain pleasure in thinking one is working 
desperately hard, and taking a great deal out of oneself; 
but it is a pleasure which is unnatural, which is factitious, 
which is morbid. It is not the healthy, unsophisticated 
human animal. We know, of course, that Lord Chief- 
Justice Ellenborough said, when he was about seventy, 
that the greatest pleasure that remained to him in life, 



WORK AND PLAY. 103 

was to hear a young barrister, named Follett, argue a 
point of law ; but it was a highly artificial state of mind, 
the result of very long training, which enabled the emi- 
nent judge to enjoy the gratification which he described: 
and to ordinary men a legal argument, however ably con- 
ducted, would be sickeningly tiresome. If you want to 
know the natural feeling of humanity towards work, see 
what children think of it. Is not the task always a dis- 
agreeable necessity, even to the very best boy ? How I 
used to hate mine ! Of course, my friendly reader, if you 
knew who I am, I should talk of myself less freely ; but 
as you do not know, and could not possibly guess, I may 
ostensively do what every man tacitly does, make my- 
self the standard of average human nature, the first me- 
ridian from which all distances and deflections are to be 
measured. Well, my feeling towards my school tasks was 
nothing short of hatred. And yet I was not a dunce. 
No, I was a clever boy. I was at the head of all my 
classes. Not more than once or twice have I competed 
at school or college for a prize which I did not get. And 
I hated work all the while. Therefore I believe that all 
unsophisticated mortals hate it. I have seen silly parents 
trying to get their children to say that they liked school- 
time better than holiday-time ; that they liked work bet- 
ter than play. I have seen, with joy, manly little fellows 
repudiating the odious and unnatural sentiment; and de- 
claring manfully that they preferred cricket to Ovid. 
And if any boy ever tells you that he would rather learn 
his lessons than go out to the play-ground, beware of 
that boy. Either his health is drooping, and his mind be- 
coming prematurely and unnaturally developed ; or he is 
a little humbug. He is an impostor. He is seeking to 
obtain credit under false pretences. Depend upon it, un- 



104 CONCERNING 

less it really be that he is a poor little spiritless man, de- 
ficient in nerve and muscle, and unhealthily precocious 
in intellect, he has in him the elements of a sneak ; and 
he wants nothing but time to ripen him into a pickpocket, 
a swindler, a horse-dealer, or a British Bank director. 

Every one, then, naturally hates work, and loves its 
opposite, play. And let it be remarked that not idle- 
ness, but play, is the opposite of work. But some peo- 
ple are so happy, as to be able to idealize their work 
into play ; or they have so great a liking for their work 
that they do not feel their work as effort, and thus the 
element is eliminated which makes work a pain. How 
I envy those human beings who have such enjoyment in 
their work, that it ceases to be work at all ! There is 
my friend Mr. Tinto the painter ; he is never so happy 
as when he is busy at his canvas, drawing forth from it 
forms of beauty : he is up at his work almost as soon 
as he has daylight for it; he paints all day, and he 
is sorry when the twilight compels him to stop. He 
delights in his work, and so his work becomes play. I 
suppose the kind of work which, in the case of ordinary 
men, never ceases to be work, never loses the conscious 
feeling of strain and effort, is that of composition. A 
great poet, possibly, may find much pleasure in writing, 
and there have been exceptional men who said they 
never were so happy as when they had the pen in their 
hand : Buffon, I think, tells us that once he wrote for 
fourteen hours at a stretch, and all that time w^as in a 
state of positive enjoyment ; and Lord Macaulay, in the 
preface to his recently published Speeches, assures us 
that the writing of his History is the occupation and the 
happiness of his life. Well, I am glad to hear it. 
Ordinary mortals cannot sympathize with the feeling. 



WORK AND PLAY. 105 

To them composition is simply hard work, and hard work 
is pain. Of course, even commonplace men have occa- 
sionally had their moments of inspiration, when thoughts 
present themselves vividly, and clothe themselves in 
felicitous expressions, without much or any conscious 
eifort. But these seasons are short and far between : 
and although while they last it becomes comparatively 
pleasant to write, it never becomes so pleasant as it 
would be to lay down the pen, to lean back in the easy- 
chair, to take up the Times or Fraser, and enjoy the 
luxury of being carried easily along that track of thought 
which costs its writer so much labour to pioneer through 
the trackless jungle of the world of mind. Ah, how 
easy it is to read what it was so difficult to write ! There 
is all the difference between running down from London 
to Manchester by the railway after it has been made, 
and of making the railway from London to Manchester. 
You, my intelligent reader, who begin to read a chapter 
of Mr. Froude's eloquent History, and get on with it so 
fluently, are like the snug old gentleman, travelling- 
capped, railway-rugged, great-coated, and plaided, who 
leans back in the corner of the softly-cushioned carriage 
as it flits over Chat-moss ; while the writer of the chap- 
ter is like George Stephenson, toiling month after month 
to make the track along which you speed, in the face of 
difficulties and discouragements which you never think 
of. And so I say it may sometimes be somewhat easy 
and pleasant to write, but never so easy and pleasant as 
it is not to write. The odd thing, too, about the work of 
the pen is this : that it is often done best by the men 
who like it least and shrink from it most, and that it is 
often the most laborious writing along which the reader's 
mind glides most easily and pleasurably. It is not so in 



106 CONCERNING 

other matters. As the general rule, no man does well 
the work which he dislikes. No man will be a good 
preacher who dislikes preaching. No man will be a 
good anatomist who hates dissecting. Sir Charles 
Napier, it must be confessed, was a great soldier, though 
he hated fighting; and as for writing, some men have 
been the best writers who hated writing, and who would 
never have penned a line but under the pressure of 
necessity. There is John Foster ; what a great writer 
he was : and yet his biography tells us, in his own words, 
too, scores of times, how he shrunk away from the in- 
tense mental effort of composition ; how he abhorred it 
and dreaded it, though he did it so admirably well. 
There is Coleridge : how that great mind ran to waste, 
because Coleridge shrank from the painful labour of for- 
mal composition : and so Christabel must have remained 
unfinished, save for the eloquent labours of that greatest, 
wisest, most original, and least commonplace of men. Dr. 
Martin Farquhar Tupper : and so, instead of volumes 
of hoarded wisdom and wit, we have but the fading 
remembrances of hours of marvellous talk. I do not by 
any means intend to assert that there are not worse 
things than work, even than very hard work ; but I say 
that work, as work, is a bad thing. It may once have 
been otherwise, but the curse is in it now. We do it 
because we must : it is our duty : we live by it ; it is the 
Creator's intention that we should; it makes us enjoy 
leisure and recreation and rest ; it stands between us and 
the pure misery of idleness ; it is dignified and honoura- 
ble; it is the soil and the atmosphere in which grow 
cheerfulness, hopefulness, health of body and mind. 
But still, if we could get all these good ends without it, 
we should be glad. "We do not care for exertion for its 



WORK AND PLAY. 107 

own sake. Even Mr. Kingsley does not love the north- 
east wind for itself, but because of the good things that 
come with it and from it. Work is not an end in itself. 
'The end of work,' said Aristotle, 'is to enjoy leisure;' 
or, as The Minstrel hath it, 'the end and the reward of 
toil is rest.' I do not wish to draw from too sacred a 
source the confirmation of these summer-day fancies ; 
but I think, as I write, of the descriptions which we find 
in a certain Volume of the happiness of another world. 
Has not many an over-wrought and wearied-out worker 
found comfort in an assurance of w^hich I shall here 
speak no further, that 'There remaineth a rest to the 
people of God ? ' 

And so, my reader, if it be true that nobody, any- 
where, would (in his sober senses) work if he could help 
it, how especially true is that great principle on this beau- 
tiful July day ! It is truly a day on which to do nothing. 
I am here, far in the country, and when I this moment 
went to the window, and looked out upon a rich summer 
landscape, everything seemed asleep. The sky is sap- 
phire-blue, without a cloud ; the sun is pouring down a 
flood of splendour upon all things ; there is not a breath 
stirring, hardly the twitter of a bird. All the air is filled 
with the fragrance of the young clover. The landscape 
is richly w^ooded ; I never saw the trees more thickly 
covered with leaves, and now they are perfectly still. I 
am writing north of the Tweed, and the horizon is of 
blue hills, which some southrons would call mountains. 
The wheat-fields are beginning to have a little of the 
harvest-tinge, and they contrast beautifully with the deep 
green of the hedge-rows. The roses are almost over, but 
I can see plenty of honeysuckle in the liedges still, and a 
perfect blaze of it has covered one projecting branch of a 



108 CONCERNING 

young oak. I am looking at a little well-shaven green 
(I shall not call it a lawn, because it is not one) ; it has 
not been mown for nearly a fortnight, and it is perfectly 
white with daisies. Beyond, at a very short distance, 
through the branches of many oaks, I can see a gable of 
the church, and a few large gravestones shining white 
among the green grass and leaves. I do not find all 
these things any great temptation now, for I have got 
interested in my work, and I like to write of them. 
But I found it uncommonly hard to sit down this morn- 
ing to my work. Indeed, I found it impossible, and thus 
it is that at five o'clock p. m., I have got no further than 
the present line. I had quite resolved that this morning 
I would sit doggedly down to my essay, in which I have 
really (though the reader may find it hard to believe it) 
got something to say ; but when I walked out after 
breakfast, I felt that all nature was saying that this was 
not a day for work. Come forth and look at me, seemed 
the message breathed from her beautiful face. And then 
I thought of Wordsworth's ballad, which sets out so 
pleasing an excuse for idleness : — 

Books ! 'tis a dull and endless strife, 

Come, hear the woodland linnet ! 
How sweet his music ! on my life 

There's more of wisdom in it. 

And hark ! how blithe the throstle sings ! 

He, too, is no mean preacher: 
Come forth into the light of things, 

Let Nature be your teacher. 

She has a world of ready wealth. 

Our minds and hearts to bless, — 
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health, 

Truth breathed by cheerfulness. 



WORK AND PLAY. 109 

One impulse fi-om a vernal wood, 

^lay teach you more of man, 
Of moral evil and of good. 

Than all the sages can ! 

Just at my gate, the man who keeps in order the roads 
of the parish was hard at work. How pleasant, I thought, 
to work amid the pure air and the sweet-smelHng clover ! 
And how pleasant, too, to have work to do of such a na- 
ture that when you go to it every morning you can make 
quite sure that, barring accident, you will accomplish a 
certain amount before the sun shall set ; while as for the 
man whose work is that of the brain and the pen, he 
never can be certain in the morning how much his day's 
labour may amount to. He niay sit down at his desk, 
spread out his paper, have his ink in the right place, and 
his favourite pen, and yet he may find that he cannot get 
on, that thoughts will not come, that his mind is utterly 
sterile, that he cannot see his way through his subject, 
or that if he can produce anything at all it is poor mis- 
erable stuff, whose poorness no one knows better than 
himself. And so, after hours of effort and discourage- 
ment, he may have to lay his work aside, having accom- 
plished nothing, having made no progress at all — wea- 
ried, stupified, disheartened, thinking himself a mere 
blockhead. Thus musing, I approached the roadman. 
I inquired how his wife and children were. I asked 
how he liked the new cottage he had lately moved into. 
Well, he said, but it was far from his work : he had walked 
eight miles and a half that morning to his work ; he had 
to walk the same distance home again in the evening after 
labouring all day ; and for this his wages were thirteen 
shillings a-week, with a deduction for such days as he 
might be unable to work. He did not mention all this 



110 CONCERNING 

by way of complaint ; he was comfortably off, he said ; 
he should be thankful he was so much better off than 
many. He had got a little pony lately very cheap, 
which Avould carry himself and his tools to and from his 
employment, and that would be very nice. In all likeli- 
hood, my friendly reader, the roadman W'Ould not have 
been so communicative to you ; but as for me, it is my 
duty and my happiness to be the sympathizing friend of 
every man, woman, and child in this parish, and it pleases 
me much to believe that there is no one throughout its 
little population wdio does not think of me and speak to 
me as a friend. I talked a little longer to the roadman 
about parish affairs. We mutually agreed in re- 
marking the incongruous colours of a pair of ponies 
which passed in a little phaeton, of which one was cream- 
coloured and the other dapple-grey. The phaeton came 
from a friend's house a little way off, and I wondered if 
it were going to the railway to bring some one who (I 
knew) was expected ; for in such simple matters do we 
simple country folk find something to maintain the inter- 
est of life. I need not go on to describe what other 
things I did ; how I looked with pleasure at a field of 
oats and another of potatoes in which I am concerned, 
and held several short conversations with passers-by ; 
but the result of the whole was a conviction that, after 
all, it was best to set to work at once, though well re- 
membering how much by indoor work in the country 
on such a day as this one is missing. And the thought 
of the roadman's seventeen miles of walking, in addi- 
tion to his day's work, was something of a reproof and 
a stimulus. And thus, determined at least to make a 
beginning, did I write this much Concerning Work and 
Play, 



^VORK AND PLAY. Ill 

I find a great want in all that is written on the sub- 
ject of recreation. People tell me that I need recreation, 
that I cannot do without it, that mind and body alike de- 
mand it. I know all that, but they do not tell me how to 
recreate myself. They fight shy of all practical details. 
Now it is just these I want. All working men must 
have play ; but what sort of play can we have ? I envy 
schoolboys their facility of being amused, and of finding 
recreation which entirely changes the current of their 
thoughts. A boy flying his kite or whipping his top is 
pursued by no remembrance of the knotty line of Virgil 
which puzzled him a little while ago in school ; but when 
the grown-up man takes his sober afternoon walk — per- 
haps the only relaxation which he has during the day — 
he is thinking still of the book which he is writing and 
of the cares which he has left at home. Then, and all 
the worse for myself, I can feel no interest in flying a 
kite, or rigging and sailing a little ship, or making a mill- 
wheel and setting it going, or in marbles, or ball, or run- 
ning races, or playing at leap-frog. And even if they 
did feel interest in athletic sports, the lungs and sinews 
of most educated men of middle age would forbid their 
joining in them. I need not therefore suggest the doubt 
which would probably be cast upon a man's sanity were he 
found eagerly knuckling down (how stiff it would soon 
make him), or wildly chasing the flying football, or making 
a rush at a friend and taking a flying leap over his head. 
Now what recreation, I want to know, is open to the 
middle-aged man of literary tastes ? Shooting, coursing, 
fishing, says one ; but he does not care for shooting, or 
coursing, or fishing. Gardening, says another ; but he 
does not care for gardening. Watching ferns, caterpil- 
lars, frogs, and other ' common objects of the country ; ' 



112 CONCERNING 

well, but he lives in town, and if lie did not, he does not 
feel the least interest in ferns and caterpillars. Music is 
suggested ; well, he has no great ear, and he may dwell 
where he can have little or none of it. Society ! pray 
what is society ? No doubt the conversation of intelli- 
gent men and women is a most grateful and stimulating 
recreation ; but is there any recreation in dreary dinner- 
parties, where one listens to the twaddle of silly old gen- 
tlemen and emptier young ones, or in the hot-house at- 
mosphere and crush of most evening parties ? These 
are not play ; they are very hard work, and a treadmill 
work producing no beneficial results, but rather provoca- 
tive of all manner of ill-tempers. Then, no doubt, there 
is most agreeable recreation for some people in the ex- 
citement of a polka or gallop and its attendant light and 
cheerful talk, not to say flirtation ; but then our repre- 
sentative man has got beyond these things : these are for 
young people — he is married now and sobered down ; 
he probably was never the man to make himself emi- 
nently agreeable in such a scene, and he is less so now 
than ever. Besides, if play be something from which 
you are to return with renewed strength and interest to 
work, I doubt whether the ball-room is the place where 
it is to be found. Late hours, a feverish atmosphere, 
and excessive exercise, tend to morning slumbers, head- 
aches, crossness, and laziness. To find dancing which 
answers the end of recreation, we must go to less fash- 
ionable places. I like the pictures which Goldsmith gives 
us of the sunny summer evenings of France, where the 
whole population of the village danced to his flute in the 
shade ; and even the soured Childe Harold melted some- 
what into sympathy with the Spanish peasants as they 
twirled their castanets in the twilight. Southey's picture 



WORK AND PLAY. 11^ 

is a pretty one, but its description sounds somewhat un- 
real : 

But peace was on the Cottage, and the fold 

From Court intrigue, from bickering faction far: 

Beneath the chestnut-tree love's tale was told, 

And to the tinkling of the light guitar. 

Sweet stooped the western sun, sweet rose the evening star!' 

Nor let it be fancied that such a scene cannot be 
represented except in countries to which distance and 
strangeness give their interest. This very season, on a 
beautiful summer evening, I saw a happy party of eighty 
country folk dancing upon a greener little bit of turf than 
Goldsmith ever saw in France. And I wished such 
things were more common ; though the grave Saxon 
spirit, equal to the enjoyment of such gaiety now and 
then, might perhaps flag under it did it come too often^ 
But on the occasion to which I refer, there was no lack 
of innocent cheerfulness ; the enjoyment seemed real ; 
and though there were no castanets and no guitars, but 
a fiddle for music and reels for dances, there were as 
pretty faces and as graceful figures among the girls, I 
warrant, as you would find from the Rhine to the 
Pyrenees. 

But, to resume the somewhat ravelled thread of our 
discussion, — if a man has come to this, that he can feel na 
interest in such recreations as those which we have men- 
tioned, what is he to do ? And let it be remembered that 
I am putting no fanciful case : be sorry, if you will, for the 
man who from taste and habit cannot be easily amused ; 
but remember that such is the lot of a very large propor- 
tion of the intellectual labourers of the race. And what 
is such a man to do ? After using his eyes and exerting 
his brain all the forenoon in reading and writing by way 
8 



114 CONCERNING 

of work, must he just use his eyes and exert his brain 
all the evening in reading and writing by way of play ? 
Has it come to this, that he must find the only recrea- 
tion that remains for him in the Times, the Quarterly 
Review, and Fraser's Magazine ? All these things are 
indeed excellent in their way. They relax and interest 
the mind : but then they wear out the eyes, they con- 
tract the chest, and render the muscles flabby, they ruin 
the ganglionic apparatus, they make the mind but un- 
make the body. Now that will not do. Does nothing 
remain, in the way of play, but the afternoon walk or 
drive : the vacant period between dinner and tea, when 
no one works, notwithstanding Johnson's warning, that 
he who resolves that he cannot work between dinner and 
tea, will probably proceed to the conclusion that he can- 
not work between breakfast and dinner ; a little quiet 
gossip with your wife, a little romping with your chil- 
dren, if you have a wife and children ; and then back 
again to the weary books ? Think of the elder Disraeli, 
who looked at printed pages so long, that by and bye, 
wherever he looked, he saw nothing but printed pages, 
and then became blind. Think what poor specimens of 
the human animal, physically, many of our noblest and 
ablest men are. Do not men, by their beautiful, touch- 
ing, and far-reaching thoughts, reach the heart and form 
the mind of thousands, who could not run a hundred 
yards without panting for breath, who could not jump 
over a five-feet wall though a mad bull were after them, 
who could not dig in the garden for ten minutes without 
having their brain throbbing and their entire frame trem- 
bling, who could not carry in a sack of coals though they 
should never see a fire again, who could never find a 
day's employment as porters, labourers, grooms, or any- 



WORK AND TLAY. 115 

4hing but tailors ? Educated and cultivated men, I tell 
you that you make a terrible mistake ; and a mistake 
which, before the end of the twentieth century, will sadly 
deteriorate the Anglo-Saxon race. You make your rec- 
reation purely mental. You give a little play to your 
minds, after their day's work ; but you give no play to 
your eyes, to your brains, to your hearts, to your diges- 
tion, — in short to your bodies. And therefore you grow 
weak, unmuscular, nervous, dyspeptic, near-sighted, out- 
of-breath, neuralgic, press ure-on-the-brain, thin-haired 
men. And in time, not only does all the train of evils 
that follows your not providing proper recreation for 
your physical nature, come miserably to affect your 
spirits ; but, besides that, it comes to jaundice and per- 
vert and distort all your views of men and things. I 
have heard of those who, though suffering almost cease- 
less pain, could yet think hopefully of the prospects of 
humanity, and take an unprejudiced view of some polit- 
ical question that appealed strongly to prejudice, and give 
kindly sympathy and sound advice to a poor man who 
came to seek advice in some little trouble which is great 
to him. But I fear that in the majority of instances, the 
human being whose liver is in a bad way, whose diges- 
tion is ruined, or even who is suffering from violent 
toothache, is prone to snub the servants, to box the chil- 
dren's ears, to think that Britain is going to destruction, 
and that the world is coming to an end. 

It may be said, that the class of intellectual work- 
ers have their yearly holiday. August and September 
in each year bring with them the ' Long Vacation.' 
And it is well, indeed, that most men whose work is 
brain-work have that blessed period of relief, wherein, 
amid the Swiss snows, or the Highland heather, or out 



116 CONCERNING 

upon the Mediterranean waves, they seek to re-invigorate 
the jaded body and mind, and to lay in a store of health 
and strength with which to face the winter work again. 
But this is not enough. A man might just as well say 
that he would eat in August or September all the food 
which is to support him through the year, as think in 
that time to take the whole year's recreation, the whole 
year's play, in one honne houche. Recreation must be a 
daily thing. Every day must have its play, as well as 
iti work. There is much sound, practical sense in Sir 
Thomas More's Utopia ; and nowhere sounder than 
where he tells us that in his model country he would 
have ' half the day allotted for work, and half for honest 
recreation.' Every day, bringing, as it does, work to 
every man who is worth his salt in this world, ought 
likewise to bring its play: play which will turn the 
thoughts into quite new and cheerful channels ; which 
will recreate the body as well as the mind ; and tell me, 
Great Father of Waters, to whom Rasselas appealed 
upon a question of equal difficulty, — or tell me, anybody 
else, what that play shall be ! Practically, in the case 
of most educated men, of most intellectual workers, heavy 
reading and writing stand for work, and light reading 
and writing stand for play. 

I can well imagine what a delightful thing it must be 
for a toil-worn barrister to throw briefs, and cases, and 
reports aside, and quitting the pestilential air of West- 
minster Hall, laden with odours from the Thames which 
are not the least like those of Araby the Blest, to set off 
to the Highlands for a few weeks among the moors. No 
schoolboy at holiday-time is lighter-hearted than he, as 
he settles down into his corner in that fearfully fast ex- 
press train on the Great Northern Railway. And when 



WORK AND PLAY. 117 

he reaches his box in the North at last, what a fresh and 
happy sensation it must be to get up in the morning in 
that pure, unbreathed air, with the feeh'ng that he has 
nothing to do, — nothing, at any rate, except what he 
chooses; and after the deliberately-eaten breakfast, to 
saunter forth with the delightful sense of leisure, — to 
know that he has time to breathe and think after the 
ceaseless hurry of the past months, — and to know that 
nothing will go wrong although he should sit down on 
the mossy parapet of the little one-arched bridge that 
spans the brawling mountain-stream, and there rest, and 
muse, and dream just as long as he likes. Two or three 
such men come to this neighbourhood yearly ; and I en- 
joy the sight of them, they look so happy. Every little 
thing, if they indeed be genial, true, un stiffened meii, is 
a source of interest to them. The total change makes 
them grow rapturous about matters which we, who are 
quite accustomed to them, take more coolly. I think, 
when I look at them, of the truthful lines of Gray: 

See the wretch, that long has tost, 

On the thorny bed of pain, 
At length repair his vigour lost. 

And breathe and walk again: 

The meanest flowret of the vale, 
The simplest note that swells the gale, 
The common sun, the air, the skies, 
To him are opening paradise. 

Eqtiidem invideo, a little. I feel somewhat vexed when 
I think how much more beautiful these pleasant scenes 
around me really are, than what, by any effort, I can 
make them seem to me. You hard-wrought town folk, 
when you come to rural regions, have the advantage of 
us leisurely country people. 



118 CONCERNING 

But, much as that great Queen's Counsel enjoys his 
long vacation's play, you see it is not enough. Look 
how thin his hair is, how pale his cheeks are, how flesh- 
less those long fingers, how unmuscular those arms. 
What he needs, in addition to the autumn holiday, is 
some bond fide play every day of his life. What is his 
amusement when in town ? Why, mainly it consists of 
going into society, where he gains nothing of elasticity 
and vigour, but merely injures his digestive organs. 
Why does he not rather have half an hour's lively bod- 
ily exercise, — rowing, or quoits, or tennis, or skating, 
or anything he may have taste for? And if it be 
foolish to take all the year's play at once, as so many 
intellectual workers think to do, much more foolish is it 
to keep all the play of life till the work is over : to toil 
and moil at business through all the better years of our 
time in this world, in the hope that at length we shall 
be able to retire from business, and make the evening 
of life all holiday, all play. In all likelihood the man 
who takes this course will never retire at all, except into 
an untimely grave ; and if he should live to reach the 
long-coveted retreat, he will find that all play and no 
work makes life quite as wearisome and as little enjoy- 
able as all work and no play. Ennui will make him 
miserable ; and body and mind, deprived of their wonted 
occupation, will soon break down. After very hard and 
long-continued work, there is indeed a pleasure in merely 
sitting still and doing nothing. But after the feeling 
of pure exhaustion is gone, that will not suffice. A 
boy enjoys play, but he is miserable in enforced idle- 
ness. In writing about retiring from the task-work of 
life, one naturally thinks of that letter to Wordsworth, 
in which Charles Lamb told what he felt when he was 



WORK AND PLAY. 119 

finally emancipated from his drudgery in the India 
House : 

I came home for ever on Tuesday week. The incomprehensible- 
ness of my condition overwhelmed me. It was like passing from Ife 
into eternity. Every year to be as long as three; that is, to have 
three times as much real time — time that is my own — in it ! I 
wandered about thinking I was happy, and feeling I was not. But 
that tumultuousness is passing off, and I begin to understand the 
nature of the gift. Holidays, even the annual month, were always 
uneasy joys, with their conscious fugitiveness, the craving after mak- 
ing the most of them. Now, when all is holiday, there are no holi- 
days. I can sit at home, in rain or shine, without a restless impulse 
for walkings. * 

Tlu're are unhappy beings in the world, who secretly 
stand in fear of all play, on the hateful and wicked no- 
tion, which 1 believe some men regard as being of the 
essence of Christianity, though in truth it is its contra- 
diction, that everything pleasant is sinful, — that God 
dislikes to see his creatures cheerful and happy. I think 
it is the author of Friends in Council who says some- 
thing to the effect, that many people, infected with that 
Puritan falsehood, slink about creation, afraid to confess 
that they ever are enjoying themselves. It is a sad 
thing when such a belief is entertained by even grown- 
up men ; but it stirs me to absolute fury when I know 
of it being impressed upon poor little children, to repress 
their natural gaiety of heart. Did you ever, my reader, 
read that dreary and preposterous book in which Thomas 
Clarkson sought to show that Quakerism is not inconsis- 
tent with common sense ? Probably not ; but perhaps 
you may have met with Jeffrey's review of it. Nothing 
short of a vehement kicking could relieve my feelings if 
I heard some sly, money-making old rascal impressing 
upon some merry children that 



120 CONCERNING 

Stillness and qiTietness both of spirit and body are necessary, as far 
as they can be obtained. Hence, Quaker children are rebuked for all 
expressions of anger, as tending to raise those feelings which ought to 
be suppressed ; a raising even of the voice beyond due bounds, is dis- 
couraged as leading to the disturbance of their minds. They are 
taught to rise in the morning in quietness; to go about their ordinary 
occupations with quietness; and with quietness to retire to their 
beds. 

Can you think of more complete flying in the face 
of the purposes of the kind Creator ? Is it not His 
manifest intention that childhood should be the time of 
merry laughter, of gaiety, and shouts, and noise ? There 
is not a sadder sight than that of a little child premature- 
ly subdued and ' quiet.' Let me know of any drab-coat- 
ed humbug impressing such ideas on any child of mine ; 
and though from circumstances I cannot personally see 
him put under the pump, I know certain quarters in 
which it is only needful to drop a very faint hint, in 
order to have him first pumped upon, and then tarred 
and feathered. 

But there is another class of mortals, who are free 
from the Puritan principle, and who have no objection 
to amusement for themselves, but who seem to have no no- 
tion that their inferiors and their servants ought ever to do 
anything but work. The reader will remember the fash- 
ionable governess in The Old Curiosity Sh&p, who insisted 
that only genteel children should ever be permitted to 
play. The well-known lines of Dr. Isaac Watts, — 

In books, or work, or healthful play, 
Let my first years be past, — 

were applicable, she maintained, only to the children of 
families of the wealthier sort: while for poor children 
there must be a new reading, which she improvised as 
follows : — 



WORK AND PLAY. 121 

^ In work, work, work. In work alway, 

Let my first years be past : 
That I may give, for every day, 
Some good account at last. 

And as for domestic servants, poor creatures, I fear 
there is many a house in which there is no provision 
whatever made for play for them. There can be no 
drearier round of life than that to which their employers 
destine them. From the moment they rise, hours before 
any member of the family, to the moment when they 
return to bed, it is one constant push of sordid labour, — 
often in chambers to which air and light and cheerfulness 
can never come. And if they ask a rare holiday, what a 
fuss is made about it ! Now, what is the result of all this ? 
Some poor solitary beings do actually sink into the spirit- 
less drudges which such a Hfe tends to make them : but 
the greater number feel that they cannot live with all 
work and no play ; and as they cannot get play openly, 
they get it secretly : they go out at night, when you, their 
mistress, are asleep ; or they bring in their friends at 
those unreasonable hours : they get that amusement and 
recreation on the sly, and with the sense that they are 
doing wrong and deceiving, which they ought to be per- 
mitted to have openly and honestly : and thus you break 
down their moral principle, you train them to cheat you, 
you educate them into hars and thieves. Of course your 
servants thus regard you as their natural enemy : it is 
fair to take any advantage you can of a gaoler : you are 
their task-imposer, their driver, their gaoler, — anything 
but their friend ; and if they can take advantage of you 
in any way, they will. And serve you right. 

I have known injudicious clergymen who did all they 
could to discourage the games and sports of their parish- 



122 CONCERNING 

ioners. They could not i^revent them ; but one thing 
they did, — they made them disreputable. They made 
sure that the poor man who ran in a sack, or climbed a 
greased pole, felt that thereby he was forfeiting his 
character, perhaps imperilling his salvation : and so he 
thought that having gone so far, he might go the full 
length : and thus he got drunk, got into a fight, thrashed 
his wife, smashed his crockery, and went to the lock-up. 
How much better it would have been had the clergyman 
sought to regulate these amusements ; and since they 
would go on, try to make sure that they should go 
creditably and decently. Thus, poor folk might have 
been cheerful without having their conscience stinging 
them all the time : and let it be remembered, that if you 
pervert a man's moral sense (which you may quite readi- 
ly do with the uneducated classes) into fancying that it is 
wicked to use the right hand or the right foot, while the 
man still goes on using the right hand and the right foot, 
you do him an irreparable mischief : you bring on a tem- 
per of moral recklessness ; and help him a considerable 
step towards the gallows. Since people must have amuse- 
ment, and will have amusement; for any sake do not get 
them to think that amusement is wicked. You cannot 
keep them from finding recreation of some sort : you 
may drive them to find it at a lower level, and to partake 
of it soured by remorse, and by the wretched resolution 
that they will have it right or wrong. Instead of anath- 
ematizing all play, sympathize with it genially and 
heartily ; and say, with kind-hearted old Burton — 

Let the world have their may-games, wakes, whitsunals; their 
danchigs and concerts ; then- puppet-shows, hobby-horses, tabors, 
bagpipes, balls, barley-breaks, and whatever sports and recreations 
please them best, provided they be followed with discretion. 



WORK AND PLAY. 123 

Let it be here remarked, that recreation can be fully 
enjoyed only by the man who has some earnest occupa- 
tion. The end of the work is to enjoy leisure ; but to 
enjoy leisure you must have gone through work. Play- 
time must come after schooltime, otherwise it loses its 
savour. Play, after all, is a relative thing ; it is not a 
thing which has an absolute existence. There is no such 
thing as play, except to the worker. It comes out by 
contrast. Put white upon white, and you can hardly see 
it: put white upon black and how plain it is. Light 
your lamp in the sunshine, and it is nothing : you must 
have darkness round it to make its presence felt. And 
besides this, a great part of the enjoyment of recreation 
consists in the feeling that we have earned it by previous 
hard work. One goes out for the afternoon walk with a 
light heart when one has done a good task since break- 
fast. It is one thing for a dawdling idler to set off to the 
Continent or to the Highlands, just because he is sick of 
everything around him ; and quite another thing when a 
hard-wrought man, who is of some use in life, sets off, 
as gay as a lark, with the pleasant feeling that he has 
brought some worthy work to an end, on the self-same 
tour. And then a busy man finds a relish in simple recre- 
ations ; while a man who has nothing to do, finds all 
things wearisome, and thinks that life is ' used up : * it 
takes something quite out of the way to tickle that indu- 
rated palate : you might as well think to prick the hide of 
a hippopotamus with a needle, as to excite the interest of 
that blase being by any amusement which is not highly 
spiced with the cayenne of vice. And that, certainly, has a 
powerful effect. It was a glass of water the wicked old 
French woman was drinking when she said, *■ Oh, that 
this were a sin, to give it a relish ! ' 



124 CONCERNING 

So it is worth while to work, if it were only that we 
might enjoy play. Thus doth Mr. Heliogabalus, my 
next neighbour, who is a lazy man and an immense glut- 
ton, walk four miles every afternoon of his life. It is 
not that he hates exertion less, but that he loves dinner 
more ; and the latter cannot be enjoyed unless the for- 
mer is endured. And the man whose disposition is the 
idlest may be led to labour when he finds that labour is 
his only chance of finding any enjoyment in life. James 
Montgomery sums up much truth in a couple of lines in 
his Pelican Island, which run thus : — 

Labour, the symbol of man's punishment; 
Labour, the secret of man's happiness. 

Why on earth do people think it fine to be idle and 
useless ? Fancy a drone superciliously desiring a work- 
ing bee to stand aside, and saying, ' out of the way, you 
miserable drudge ; 1 never made a drop of honey in all 
my life ! ' I have observed too, that some silly people 
are ashamed that it should be known that they are so 
useful as they really are, and take pains to represent 
themselves as more helpless, ignorant, and incapable than 
the fact. I have heard a weak old lady boast that her 
grown-up daughters were quite unable to fold up their 
own dresses ; and that as for ordering dinner they had 
not a notion of such a thing. This and many similar 
particulars were stated with no small exultation, and that 
by a person far from rich and equally far from aristo- 
cratic. ' What a silly old woman you are,' was my silent 
reflection ; ' and if your daughters really are what you 
represent them, woe betide the poor man who shall 
marry one of the incapable young noodles.' Give me 
the man, I say, who can turn his hand to all things, and 



WORK AND PLAY. 125 

who is not ashamed to confess that he can do so ; who 
can preach a sermon, nail up a pahng, prune a fruit tree, 
make a waterwheel or a kite for his Httle boy, write an 
article for Fraser or a leader for the 2rmes or the Spec- 
tator. What a fine, genial, many-sided life did Sydney 
Smith lead at his Yorkshire parish ! I should have 
liked, I own, to have found in it more traces of the cler- 
gyman ; but perhaps the biographer thought it better not 
to parade these. And in the regard of facing all difficul- 
ties with a cheerful heart, and nobly resolving to be use- 
ful and helpful in little matters as well as big, I think 
that life was as good a sermon as ever was preached 
from pulpit. 

I have already said, in the course of this rambling dis- 
cussion, that recreation must be such as shall turn the 
thoughts into a new channel, otherwise it is no recreation 
at all. And walking, which is the most usual physical 
exercise, here completely fails. Walking has grown by 
long habit a purely automatic act, demanding no atten- 
tion : we think all the time we are walking ; Southey 
even read while he took his daily walk. But Southey's 
story is a fearful warning. It will do a clergyman no 
good whatever to leave his desk and go forth for his con- 
stitutional, if he is still thinking of his sermon, and trying 
to see his way through the treatment of his text. You 
see in Gray's famous poem how little use is the mere 
walk to the contemplative man, how thoroughly it falls 
short of the end of play. You see how the hectic lad 
who is supposed to have written the Elegy employed 
himself when he wandered abroad : 

There, at the foot of yonder nodding beech, 
That wreaths its old fantastic roots so high, 

His listless length at noontide would he stretch, 
And pore upon the brook that babbles by. 



126 CONCERNING 

Hard by yon wood, now snailing as in scorn, 
Muttering his wayward fancies lie would rove; 

Now drooping, woful, wan, like one forlorn. 
Or crazed with care, or crossed in hopeless love. 

That was the fashion in which the poor fellow took his 
daily recreation and exercise ! His mother no doubt 
packed him out to take a bracing walk ; she ought to 
have set him to saw wood for the fire, or to dig in the 
garden, or to clean the door-handles if he had muscle for 
nothing more. These things would have distracted his 
thoughts from their grand flights, and prevented his 
mooning about in that listless manner. Of course while 
walking he was bothering away about the poetical trash 
he had in his desk at home ; and so he knocked up his 
ganglionic functions, he encouraged tubercles on his 
lungs, and came to furnish matter for the ' hoary-headed 
swain's ' narrative, the silly fellow ! 

Riding is better than walking, especially if you have a 
rather skittish steed, who compels you to attend to him 
on pain of being landed in the ditch, or sent, meteor-like, 
over the hedge. The elder DisraeH has preserved the 
memory of the diversions in which various hard thinkers 
found relaxation. Petavius, who wrote a deeply learned 
book, which I never saw, and which no one I ever saw 
ever heard of, twirled round his chair for five minutes 
every two hours that he was at work. Samuel Clark 
used to leap over the tables and chairs. It was a rule 
which Ignatius Loyola imposed on his followers, that 
after two hours of work, the mind should always be un- 
bent by some recreation. Every one has heard of 
Paley's remarkable feats of rapid horsemanship. Hun- 
dreds of times did that great man fall off. The Sultan 
Mahomet, who conquered Greece, unbent his mind by 
carving wooden spoons. In all these things you see, 



WORK AND PLAY. 127 

kindly reader, that true recreation was aimed at : that is, 
entire change of thought and occupation. Izaak WaUon, 
again, wlio sets forth so pleasantly the praise of angling 
as the ' Contemplative Man's Recreation,' wrongly thinks 
to recommend the gentle craft by telling us that the 
angler may think all the while he plies it. I do not care 
for angling ; I never caught a minnow ; but still I joy in 
good old Izaak's pleasant pages, like thousands who do 
not care a pin for fishing, but who feel it like a cool re- 
treat into green fields and trees to turn to his genial 
feeling and hearty pictures of quiet English scenery. 
He, however, had a vast opinion of the joys of angling 
in a pleasant country : only let him go quietly a-fish- 
itig: — 

And if contentment be a stranger then, 
ril ne'er look for it, but in heaven, again. 

And he repeats with much approval the sentiments 
of ' Jo. Davors, Esq.,' in whose lines we may see much 
more of scenery than of the actual fishing : — 

Let me live harmlessly; and near the brink 
Of Trent or Avon have a dwelling-place, 

Where I may see my quill or cork down sink, 
With eager bite of perch, or bleak, or dace: 

And on the world and my Creator think : 
While some men strive ill-gotten goods to embrace; 

And others spend their time in base excess 

Of wine, or worse, in war and wantonness. 

Let them that list, these pastimes still pursue. 
And on such pleasing fancies feed their fill ; 

So I the fields and meadows gi*een may view. 
And daily by fresh rivers walk at will, 

Among the daisies and the violets blue, 
Eed hyaciuth and yellow dafibdil; 

Purple narcissus like the morning's rays. 

Pale gander-grass, and azure culver-keys. 



128 CONCERNING 

All these, and many more of His ci'eation, 
That made the heavens, the angler oft doth see; 

Taking therein no little delectation, 

To think how strange, how wonderful they be ! 

Framing thereof an inward contemplation. 
To set his heart from other fancies free : 

And whilst he looks on these with joyful eye, 

His mind is rapt above the starry sky. 

Who shall say that the terza-rima stanza was not writ- 
ten in English fluently and gi-acefully, before the days of 
"Whistlecraft and Don Juan ? 

If thou desirest, reader, to find a catalogue of sports 
from which thou mayest select that which likes thee best, 
turn up Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy^ or Joseph 
Strutt's Sports and Pastimes of the People of England. 
There mayest thou read of Rural Exercises practised hy 
Persons of Bank, of Rural Exercises Generally prac- 
tised : (note how ingeniously Strutt puts the case : he 
does not say practised by Snobs, or the Lower Orders, 
or the Mobocracy). Next are Pastimes Exercised in 
Towns and Cities; and finally, Domestic Amusements, 
and Pastimes Appropriated to particular Seasons. Were 
it not that my paper is verging to its close, I could sur- 
prise thee with a vast display of curious erudition ; but I 
must content myself with having laid down the condi- 
tions which all true play must fulfil ; and let every man 
choose the kind of play which hits his peculiar taste. 
There never has been in England any lack of sports in 
nominal existence : I heartily wish they were all (except 
the cruel ones of baiting and torturing animals) still kept 
up. The following lines are from a little book pub- 
lished in the reign of James I. : — 

Man, I dare challenge thee to Throw the Sledge, 
To Jump or Leape over ditch or hedge : 



WORK AND PLAY. 129 

To Wrastle, play at Stooleball, or to Runne, 
To Pitch the Barrc, or to shoote off a Gunne: 
To play at Loggetts, Nuie Holes, or Ten Pinnes, 
To try it out at Football by the shinnes: 
At Ticktack, Irish Noddie, Maw, and Ruffe, 
At Hot Cockles, Leapfrog, or Blindmanbuffe : 
To drink half-pots, or deale at the whole canne, 
To play at Base, or Pen and ynkhorne Sir Jan: 
To daunce the Morris, play at Barley-breake, 
At all exploytes a man can think or speak: 
At Shove-Groatc. Venterpoynt, or Crosse and Pile, 
At Beshrow him that's last at yonder Style: 
At leaping o'er a Midsommer-bon-fier, 
Or at the Di-awing Dun out of the ]\Iyer. 

In most agricultural districts it is wonderful how little 
play there is in the life of the labouring class. Well 
may the agricultural labourer be called a ' working-man,' 
for truly he does little else than work. His eating and 
sleeping are cut down to the minimum that shall suffice 
to keep him in trim for working. And the consequence 
is, that when he does get a holiday, he does not know 
what to make of himself; and in too many cases he 
spends it in getting drunk. I know places where the 
working men have no idea of any play, of any recreation, 
except getting drunk. And if their overwrought wives, 
who must nurse five or six children, prepare the meals, 
tidy the house, — in fact, do the work which occupies 
three or four servants in the house of the poorest gen- 
tleman, — if the poor overwrought creatures can contrive 
to find a blink of leisure through their waking hours, 
they know how to make no nobler use of it than to gos- 
sip, rather ill-naturedly, about their neighbours' affairs, 
and especially to discuss the domestic arrangements of 
the squire and the parson. Working men and women 
too frequently have forgotten how to play. It is so long 
since they did it, and they have so little heart for it. 



130 CONCERNING WORK AND PLAY. 

And God knows that the pressure of constant care, and 
the wolf kept barely at arm's length from the door, do 
leave little heart for it. O wealthy proprietors of land, 
you who have so much in your power, try to infuse 
something of joy and cheerfulness into the lot of your 
humble neighbours ! Read and ponder the essay and 
the conversation on Recreation, which you will find in the 
first volume of Friends in Council. And read again, I 
trust for the hundredth time, the poem from which I 
quote the lines which follow. Let me say here, that I 
verily believe some of my readers will not know the 
source whence I draw these lines. More is the shame : 
but longer experience of life is giving me a deep convic- 
tion of the astonishing ignorance of my fellow-creatures. 
I shall not tell them. They shall have the mortification 
of asking their friends the question. Only let it be added, 
that the poem where the passage stands, contains others 
more sweet and touching by far, — so sweet and touch- 
ing that in all the range of English poetry they have 
never been surpassed. 

How often have I blest the coming day, 

When toil remitting, lent its turn to play; 

And all the village train, from labour free. 

Led up their sports beneath the spreading tree, 

While many a pastime circled in the shade, 

The young contending as the old surveyed; 

And many a gambol frolick'd o'er the ground. 

And sleights of art and feats of strength went round. 

And still, as each repeated pleasure tired, 

Succeeding sports the mirthful band inspired: 

The dancing pair that simply sought renown, 

By holding out to tire each other down, — 

The swain mistrustless of his smutted face. 

While secret laughter tittei-'d round the place, — 

The bashful virgin's sidelong looks of love. 

The matron's glance that would those looks reprove. 

These were thy charms, sweet village, sports like these, 

With sweet succession, taught even toil to please. 



CHAPTER V. 

CONCERNING COUNTRY HOUSES AND COUNTRY 
LIFE. 




NCE upon a time, I lived in the very heart 
^ of London : absolutely in Threadnoedle- 
street. I lived in the house of a near rela- 
^^ tion, an opulent lawyer, who, after he had 
become a rich man, chose still to dwell in the locality 
where he had made his fortune. All around, for miles 
in every direction, there were nothing but piles of houses 
— streets and lanes of dingy brick houses everywhere. 
Not a vestige of nature could be seen, except in the sky 
above, in the stunted vegetation of a few little City gar- 
dens, and in the foul and discoloured river. The very 
surface of the earth, for yards in depth, was the work of 
generations that had lived and died centuries before amid 
the narrow lanes of the ancient city. There, for months 
together, I, a boy without youth, under the care of one 
who, though substantially kind, had not a vestige of 
sympathy with nature or with home affections, wearily 
counted the days which were to pass before the yearly 
visit to a home far away. I cannot by any words ex- 
press the thirst and craving which I then felt for green 
fields and trees. The very name of the country was like 
music in my ear ; and when I heard any man say he Avas 
going doivn to the country, how I envied him ! It was 
not so bad in winter : though even then the clear frosty 



132 CONCERNING COUNTRY HOUSES 

days called up many pictures of cheerful winter skies away 
from those weary streets ; — of boughs bending beneath 
the quiet snow ; — of the beautiful fretwork of the frost 
upon the hedges and the grass, and of its exhilarating 
crispness in the air ; — of the stretches of the frozen 
river, seen through the leafless boughs, covered with 
happy groups whose merry faces were like a good-natured 
defiance of the wintry weather. But when the spring 
revival began to make itself felt ; when the days began 
to lengthen, and the poor shrubs in the squares to bud, 
and when there was that accession of light during the 
.day which is so cheerful after the winter gloom, then the 
Jonging for the country grew painfully strong, like the 
seaman's calenture, or the Swiss exile's yearning for his 
native hills. When I knew that the hawthorn hedges 
were white, and the fruit-trees laden with blossoms, how 
I longed to be among them ! I well remember the 
kindly feeling I bore to a dingy hostelry in a narrow lane 
off Cheapside, for the sake of its name. It was called 
Blossom's Inn ; and many a time I turned out of my way, 
and stood looking up at its sign, with eyes that saw a 
very different scene from the blackened walls. I remem- 
ber how I used to rise at early morning, and take long 
walks in whatever direction I thought it possible that a 
glimpse of anything like the country could be seen : 
away up the New North-road there were some trees, 
and some little plots of grass. There was something at 
once pleasing and sad about those curious little gardens 
which still exist here and there in the heart of London, 
consisting generally of a plot of grass of a dozen yards 
in length and breadth, surrounded by a walk of yellow 
gravel, stared at on every side by the back windows of 
tall brick houses, and containing a few little trees, whose 



AND COUNTRY LIFE. 133 

leaves in spring look so strangely fresh against the smoke- 
blackened branches. I do not wish to be egotistical ; and 
I describe all these feelings merely because I believe that 
honestly to tell exactly what one has himself felt, is the 
true way to describe the common feelings of most people 
in like circumstances. I dare say that if any youth of 
sixteen, pent up in Threadneedle-street now, should hap- 
pen to read what I have written, he will understand it 
all with a hearty sympathy which I shall not succeed in 
exciting in the minds of many of my readers. But such 
a one will know, thoroughly and completely, what pic- 
tures rise before the mind's eye of one pent up amid 
miles of brick walls and stone pavements, at the mention 
of the country, of trees, hedge-rows, fields, quiet lanes and 
footpaths, and simple rustic people. 

I wish to assure the man, shut up in a great city, that 
he has compensations and advantages of which he prob- 
ably does not think. The keenness of his relish for 
country scenes, the intensity of his enjoyment of his oc- 
casional glimpses of them, counterbalance in a great de- 
gree the fact that his glimpses of them are but few. I 
live in the country now, and have done so for several 
years. It is a beautiful district of country too, and amid 
a quiet and simple population ; yet I must confess that 
my youthful notion of rural bliss is a good deal abated. 
* Use lessens marvel, it is said : ' one cannot be always in 
raptures about what one sees every hour of every day. 
It is the man in populous cities pent, who knows the 
value of green fields. It is your cockney (I mean your 
educated Londoner) who reads Bracehridge Hall with 
the keenest delight, and luxuriates in the thought of 
country scenes, country houses, country life. He has 
not come close enou"fh to discern the flaws and blemishes 



134 CONCERNING COUNTRY HOUSES 

of the picture ; and he has not learned by experience 
that in whatever scenes led, human life is always much 
the same thing. I have long since found that the coun- 
try, in this nineteenth century, is by no means a scene 
of Arcadian innocence ; — that its apparent simplicity is 
sometimes dogged stupidity ; — that men lie and cheat in 
the country just as much as in the town, and that the 
country has even more of mischievous tittle-tattle ; — 
that sorrow and care and anxiety may quite well live in 
Elizabethan cottages grown over with honeysuckle and 
jasmine, and that very sad eyes may look forth from 
windows round which roses twine. The poets (town 
poets, no doubt) were drawing upon their imagination, 
when they told how ' Virtue lives in Irwan's Vale,' and 
how ' with peace and plenty there, lives the happy vil- 
lager.' Virtue and religion are plants of difficult growth, 
even in the country ; and notwithstanding Cowper's ex- 
quisite poem, I am not sure that ' The calm retreat, the 
silent shade, with prayer and praise agree,' better than 
the closet into which the weary man may enter, in the 
quiet evening, after the business and bustle of the town. 
People may pace up and down a country lane, between 
fragrant hedges of blossoming hawthorn, and tear their 
neighbours' characters to very shreds. And the eye, 
that is sharp to see the minutest object on the hillside 
far away, may be blind to the beauty which is spread 
over all the landscape. Nor is the country always in the 
trim holiday dress which delights the summer wayfarer. 
Country roads are not all nicely gravelled walks between 
edges of clipped box, or through velvety turf, shaven by 
weekly mowings. There are many days on which the 
country looks, to any one without a most decided taste 
for it, extremely bleak and drear. The roads are pud- 



AND COUNTRY LIFE. 135 

dies of mud, which will search, its way through boots to 
which art has supplied soles of two inches thickness. 
The deciduous trees are shivering skeletons, bending be- 
fore the howling blast. The sheep paddle about the 
brown fields, eating turnips mingled with clay. Now, 
for myself, I like all that : but a man from the town 
would not. I positively enjoy the wet, blustering after- 
noon, with its raw wind, its driving sleet, its roads of 
mud. How delightful the rapid 'constitutional' from 
half-past two till half-past four, with the comfortable feel- 
ing that we have accomplished a good forenoon's work 
at our desk (sermon or article, as the case may be), and 
with the cheerful prospect of getting rid of all these 
sloppy garments, and feeling so snug and clean ere we 
sit down to dinner, when we shall hear the rain and wind 
softened into music through the warm crimson drapery 
of our windows ; and then the evening of leisure amid 
books and music, with the placens uxor on the other 
easy-chair by the fireside, and the little children, scream- 
ing with delight, tumbling about one's knees. So I like 
even the gusty, rainy afternoon, for the sake of all that it 
suggests to me. Nor will the true inhabitant of the 
country forget the delight with which he has hailed a 
gloomy, drizzling November day, when he has evergreen 
shrubs to transplant. Have I not stood for hours, in a 
state of active and sensible enjoyment, watching how the 
hollies and yews and laurels gradually clothed some bare 
spot or unsightly corner, rejoicing that the calm air and 
ceaseless mizzle which made my attendants and myself 
like soaked sponges, was life to these stout shoots and 
these bright hearty green leaves ! But a town man does 
not understand all these things ; and I have no doubt 
that on one of these January days, when the entire dis- 



136 CONCERNING COUNTRY HOUSES 

tant prospect — hills, sky, trees, fields — might be faith- 
fully depicted on canvas by different shades of Indian 
ink, he would see nothing in the prospect but gloom and 
desolation. 

Then it is very picturesque to see the ploughman at 
work on a soft, mild winter day. It is a beautiful con- 
trast, that light brown of the turned-over earth, and the 
fresh green of the remainder of the field ; and what more 
pleasing than these lines of furrow, so beautifully straight 
and regular? But go up and walk by the ploughman's 
side, you man from town, and see how you like it. You 
will find it awfully dirty work. In a few minutes you 
will find it difficult to drag along your feet, laden with 
some pounds weight to each of adherent earth ; and you 
will have formed some idea of the physical exertion, and 
the constant attention, which the ploughman needs, to 
keep his furrow straight and even, to retain the plough 
the right depth in the ground, and to manage his horses. 
Hard work for that poor fellow ; and ill-paid work. No 
horse, mule, donkey, camel, or other beast of labour in 
the world, goes through so much exertion, in proportion 
to his strength, between sunrise and sunset, as does that 
rational being, all to earn the humblest shelter and the 
poorest fare that will maintain bare life. You walk be- 
side him, and see how poorly he is dressed. His feet 
have been wet since six o'clock a.m., when he went half 
a mile from his cottage up to the stables of the farm to 
dress his horses : he has had a little tea and coarse 
bread, and nothing more, for his dinner at twelve o'clock 
(I speak from personal knowledge) : he will have nothing 
more till his twelve (I have known it fifteen) hours of 
work are finished, when he will have his scanty supper : 
and while he is walking backwards and forwards all day, 



AND COUNTRY LIFE. 137 

his mind is not so engaged but that he has abundant time 
to think of his Httle home anxieties, which are not Httle 
to him, though they may be nothing, my reader, to you 
— of the aihng wife at home, for whom the doctor orders 
wine which he cannot buy, and of the children, poorly 
fed, and barely clad, and hardly at all educated, born to 
the same life of toil and penury as himself. I know 
nothing about political economy ; I have not understand- 
ing for it ; and I feel glad, when I think of the social 
evils I see, that the responsibility of treating them rests 
upon abler heads than mine. Neither do I know how 
much truth there may be in the stories of which I hear 
the echoes from afar, of the occasional privation and op- 
pression of the manufacturing poor, against which, as it 
seems to me, these unhappy strikes and trades unions 
are their helpless and frantic appeal. But I can say, 
from my own knowledge of the condition of our agricul- 
tural population, that sometimes men bearing the charac- 
ter of reputable farmers practise as great tyranny and 
cruelty towards their labourers and cottars, under a pure 
sky and amid beautiful scenery, as ever disgraced the 
ugly and smoky factory-town, where such things seem 
more in keeping with the locality. 

Yet, though in a gloomy mood, one can easily make out 
a long catalogue of country evils, — evils which I know 
cannot be escaped in a fallen world, and among a sinful 
race, — still I thank God that my lot is cast in the coun- 
try. I know, indeed, that the town contains at once 
the best and the worst of mankind. In the country, 
we are, intellectually and morally, a sort of middling 
species ; we do not present the extremes, either in good 
or evil, which are to be found in the hot-house atmos- 
phere of great cities. There is no reasoning with tastes, 



138 CONCERNING COUNTRY HOUSES 

as every one knows ; but to some men there is, at every 
season, an indescribable charm about a country life. I 
like to know all about the people around me ; and I do 
not care though in return they know all, and more than 
all, about me. I like the audible stillness in which one 
lives on autumn days ; the murmur of the wind through 
trees even when leafless, and the brawl of the rivulet 
even when swollen and brown. There is a constant 
source of innocent pleasure and interest in little country 
cares, in planting and tending trees and flowers, in sym- 
pathizing with one's horses and dogs, — even with pigs 
and poultry. And although one may have lived beyond 
middle age without the least idea that he had any taste 
for such matters, it is amazing how soon he will find, 
when he comes to call a country home his own, that the 
taste has only been latent, kept down by circumstances, 
and ready to spring into vigorous existence whenever 
the repressing circumstances are removed. Men in whom 
this is not so, are the exception to the universal rule. 
Take the senior wrangler from his college, and put him 
down in a pretty country parsonage ; and in a few weeks 
he will take kindly to training honeysuckle and climbing 
roses, he will find scope for his mathematics in laying 
out a flower-garden, and he will be all excitement in 
planning and carrying out an evergreen shrubbery, a 
primrose bank, a winding walk, a little stream with a 
tiny waterfall, spanned by a rustic bridge. Proud he 
will be of that piece of engineering, as ever was Robert 
Stephenson when he had spanned the stormy Menai. 
There is something in all this simple work that makes a 
man kind-hearted: out-of-door occupation of this sort 
gives one much more cheerful views of men and things, 
and disposes one to sympathize heartily with the cottager 



AND COUNTRY LIFE. 139 

proud of his little rose-plots, and of his enormous gooseber- 
ry that attained to renown in the pages of the county news- 
paper. I do not say anything of the incalculable advan- 
tage to health which arises from this pleasant intermin- 
gling of mental and physical occupation in the case of the 
recluse scholar ; nor of the animated rebound with which 
one lays down the pen or closes the volume, and hastens 
out to the total change of interest which is found in the 
open air ; nor of the evening at mental work again, but 
with the lungs that play so freely, the head that feels so 
cool and clear, the hand so firm and ready, testifying that 
we have not forgotten the grand truth that to care for 
bodily health and condition is a Christian duty, bringing 
with its due discharge an immediate and sensible bless- 
ing. I am sure that the poor man who comes to ask a 
favour of his parish clergyman, has a far better chance of 
finding a kind and unhurried hearing, if he finds him of 
an afternoon superintending his labourers, rosy with 
healthful exercise, delighted with the good effect which 
has been produced by some little improvement — the 
deviation of a walk, the placing of an araucaria — than 
if he found the parson a bilious, dyspeptic, splenetic, 
gloomy, desponding, morose, misanthropic, horrible ani- 
mal, with knitted brow and jarring nerves, lounging in 
his easy-chair before the fire, and afraid to go out into 
the fine clear air, for fear (unhappy wretch) of getting a 
sore throat or a bad cough. I remember to have read 
som.ewhere of an humble philanthropist who undertook 
the reformation of a number of juvenile thieves ; and for 
that end employed them in a large garden somewhere 
near London, to raise vegetables and flowers for the mar- 
ket. There did the youthful prig concentrate his thoughts 
on the planting of cabbage, and find the unwonted de- 



140 CONCERNING COUNTRY HOUSES 

light of a clay spent in innocent labour ; there did the 
area-sneak bud the rose and set the potato ; and there, 
as days passed on, under the gentle influence of vegetable 
nature, did a healthier, happier, purer tone come over 
the spiritual nature, even as a healthier blood came to 
heart and veins. The philanthropist was a true philoso- 
pher. There is not a more elevating and purifying occu- 
pation than that of tending the plants of the earth. I 
should never be afraid of finding a man revengeful, ma- 
lignant, or cruel, whom I knew to be fond of his shrubs 
and flowers. And I believe that in the mind of most 
men of cultivation, there is some vague, undefined sense 
that the country is the scene where human life attains its 
happiest development. I believe that the great propor- 
tion of such men cherish the hope, perhaps a distant and 
faint one, that at some time they shall possess a country 
home where they may pass the last years tranquilly, far 
from the tumult of cities. Many of those who cherish 
such a hope will never realize it ; and many more are 
quite unsuited for enjoying a country life were it within 
their reach. But all this is founded upon the instinctive 
desire there is in human nature to possess some portion 
of the earth's surface. You look with indescribable in- 
terest at an acre of ground which is your own. There is 
something quite remarkable about your own trees. You 
have a sense of property in the sunset over your own 
hills. And there is a perpetual pleasure in the sight of 
a fair landscape, seen from your own door. Do not be- 
lieve people who say that all scenes soon become indiffer- 
ent, through being constantly seen. An ugly street may 
cease to be a vexation, when you get accustomed to it ; 
but a pleasant prospect becomes even more pleasant, 
when the beauty Avhich arises from your own associations 



AND COUNTRY LIFE. 141 

with it is added to that which is properly its own. No 
doubt, you do grow weary of the landscape before your 
windows, when you are spending a month at some place 
of temporary sojourn, seaside or inland ; but it is quite 
different with that which surrounds your own home. 
You do not try that by so exacting a standard. You 
never think of calling your constant residence dull, though 
it may be quiet to a degree which would make you think 
a place insupportably dull, to which you were paying a 
week's visit. 

What an immense variety of human dwellino-s are 
comprised within the general name of the Country 
Home ! We begin with such places as Cliatsworth and 
Belvoir, Arundel and Alnwick, Hamilton and Drum- 
lanrig : houses standing far withdrawn within encirclino- 
woods, approached by avenues of miles in length, which 
debouch on public highways in districts of country quite 
remote from one another; with acres of conservatory, 
and scores of miles of walks ; and shutting in their sacred 
precincts by great park walls from the approach and the 
view of an obtrusive world beyond. We think of the 
old Edwardian Castle, weather-worn and grim, with 
drawbridge and portcullis and moat and oak-roofed hall 
and storied windows; of the huge, square, corniced, 
many-chimnied, ugly building of the renaissance, which 
never has anything to recommend its aspect except when 
it gains a dignity from enormous size ; then down throuo-h 

o 

the classes of manor-houses, abbeys, and halls, high- 
gabled, oriel-windowed, turret-staired, long-corridored, 
haunted-chambered, with their parks, greater or less, 
their oaken clumps, their spreading horse-chestnuts, their 
sunshiny glades, their startled deer ; till we come to the 
villa with a few acres of ground, such as Dean Swift 



142 CONCERNING COUNTRY HOUSES 

wished for himself, with its modest conservatory, its neat 
little shrubbery, its short carriage drive, its brougham or 
phaeton drawn by one stout horse. Then, upon the out- 
skirts of the country town, we find a class of less ambi- 
tious dwellings, which yet struggle for the title of villa — 
cheap would-be Gothic houses, with overhanging eaves 
and latticed windows, standing in a half-acre plot of 
ground, which yet is large enough to give a new direc- 
tion to the tradesman's thoughts, by givmg him space to 
cultivate a few shrubs and flowers. Last comes the way- 
side cottage, sometimes neat and pretty, often cold, damp, 
and ugly ; sometimes gay with its little plot of flowers, 
sometimes odorous with its neighbouring dungheap ; the 
difference depending not half so much upon the income 
enjoyed by its tenant, as upon his having a tidy, active 
wife, and a kindly, improving, generous landlord. 

And various as the varied dwellings, are the scenes 
amid which they stand. In rich English dales, in wild 
Highland glens, on the bank of quiet inland rivers, and 
on windy cliffs frowning over the ocean — there, and in 
a thousand other places, we have still the country home, 
with its peculiar characteristics. Thither comes the 
postman only once a day, always anxiously, often ner- 
vously expected : and thither the box of books, the mag- 
azines of last month, and the reviews of last quarter, 
sent from the Reading-club in the High-street of the 
town five miles off". How truly, by the way, has some- 
body or other stated that the next town and the railway 
station are always five miles away from every country 
house ! Thither the carrier, three times a week, brings 
the wicker-woven box of bread ; there does the manag- 
ing housewife have her store-room, round whose shelves 
are arranged groceries of every sort and degree ; and 



AND COUNTRY LIFE. 143 

there, at uncertain intervals, dies the home-fed sheep or 
pig, which yieldetli joints which are pronounced far 
superior to any which the butcher's shop ever suppHed. 
There, sometimes, is found the cheerful, modest estab- 
lishment, calculated rather within the income, with every- 
thing comfortable, neat, and even elegant ; where family 
dinners may be enjoyed which afford real satisfaction to 
all, and win the approval of even the most refined gour- 
met ; and there sometimes, especially when the mistress 
of the house is a fool, is found the unhappy scramble of 
the menage that, with a thousand a year, aims at aping 
five thousand ; where there is a French ladies'-maid of 
cracked reputation, and a lady who talks largely of 
' what has she been accustomed to,' and ' what she re- 
gards herself as entitled to ; ' where every-day comfort 
is sacrificed to occasional attempts at showy entertain- 
ments, to which the neighbouring peer goes under the 
pressure of a most urgent invitation ; where gooseberry 
champagne and very acid claret flow in hospitable pro- 
fusion ; and where dressed-up stable-boys and plough- 
men dash wildly up against each other, as the uneasy 
banquet strains anxiously along. 

Very incomplete would be any attempt at classifying 
the country homes of Britain, in which no mention 
should be made of the dwellings of the clergy. In this 
country, the parish priest is not isolated from all sym- 
pathy with the members of his flock, by an enforced 
celibacy ; he is not only the spiritual guide of his parish- 
ioners, but he is in most instances the head of a family, 
the cultivator of the ground, the owner of horses, cows, 
sheep, pigs, and dogs. I do not deny that in theory, and 
once perhaps in a thousand times in practice, it is a finer 
thing that the clergyman should be one gi\en exclusively 



144 CONCERNING COUNTRY PIOUSES 

to his sacred calling, standing apart from and elevated 
above the little prosaic cares of life, and ' having his 
conversation in Heaven.' It seems at first as if it bet- 
ter befitted one who has to be much exercised in sacred 
thoughts and duties — whose hands are to dispense the 
sacred emblems of Communion, and whose voice is to 
breathe direction and comfort into dying ears — to have 
nothing to do with such sublunary matters as seeing a 
cold bandage put upon a horse's foreleg, or arranging for 
the winter supply of hay, or considering as to laying in 
store of coals at the setting in of snowy weather. It 
jars somewhat upon our imagination of the even run of 
that holy calling, to think of the parson (like Sydney 
Smith) proudly producing his lemon-bag, or devising his 
patent Tantalus and his universal scratcher. But surely 
all this is a wrong view of things. Surely it is Platonism 
rather than Christianity to hold that there is anything 
necessarily debasing or materializing about the cares of 
daily life. All these cares take their character from the 
spirit with which we pass through them. The simple 
French monk, five hundred years since, who acted as 
cook to his brethren, indicated the clergyman's true path 
when he wrote, ' I put my little egg-cake on the fire for 
the sake of Christ ; ' and George Herbert, more grace- 
fully, has shown how, as the eye may either look on glass, 
or look through it, we may look no farther than the daily 
task, or may look through it to something nobler beyond : 

Teach me, my God and King, 

In all things Thee to see : 
And, what I do in anything, 

To do it as for Thee. 

A servant with this clause, 

Makes drudgery divine : 
Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws, 

Makes that, and the action, fine. 



AND COUNTRY LIFE. 145 

We have all in our mind some abstracted and idealized: 
picture of what the country parsonage, as well as the- 
country parson, should be : the latter, the clergyman and 
the gentleman: the former, the fit abode for him and 
his ; near the church, not too much retired from the 
public way, old and ivied, of course Gothic, with bay 
windows, fantastic gables, wreathed chimneys, and over- 
hanging eaves ; with many evergreens, with ancient 
trees, wnth peaches ripening on the sunny garden wall, 
with an indescribable calm and peacefulness over the 
whole, deepened by the chime of the passing river, and 
the windy caw of the distant rookery ; such should the 
country parsonage be. But the best of anything is not 
the commonest of the class : and I can only add that I 
believe it would afford unmingled satisfaction to the 
tenant of rectory, vicarage, parsonage, deanery, or manse, 
if his dwelling were all that the writer would wish to 
see it. 

It is pleasant to think over what we may call the 
poetry of country house-making, — the historical cases 
in which men have sought to idealize to the utmost the 
scene around them, and to live in a more ambitious or a 
humbler fairyland. Yet the instances that first occur to 
us do not encourage the belief that happiness is more 
certainly to be found in fairyland than in Manchester or 
in Siberia. One thinks of Beckford, the master of 
almost unlimited wealth, ' commanding his fairy-palace to 
glitter amid the orange groves, and aloes, and palms of 
Cintra : ' and after he had formed his paradise, wearying 
of it, and abandoning it, to move the gloomy moralizing 
of Childe Harold. One thinks of him, not yet content 
with his experience, spending twenty years upon the 
turrets and gardens of Fonthill, that ' cathedral turned 
10 



146 CONCERNING COUNTRY HOUSES 

into a toyshop ; ' whose magnificence was yet but a faint 
and distant attempt to equal the picture drawn by the 
prodigal imagination of the author of Vathek. One 
thinks of Horace Walpole, amid the gim-crackery of 
Strawberry-hill ; of Sir Walter Scott, building year by 
year that ' romance in stone and lime,' and idealizing the 
bleakest and ugliest portion of the banks of the Tweed, 
till the neglected Clartyhole became the charming but 
costly Abbotsford. One thinks of Shenstone, devoting 
his life to making a little paradise of the Leasowes, 
where, as Johnson tells us in his grand resounding prose, 
he set himself ' to point his prospects, to diversify his 
surface, to entangle his walks, and to wind his waters ; 
which he did with such judgment and fancy as made his 
little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of 
the skilful ; a place to be visited by travellers and copied 
by designers.' Nor must we forget how the bitter little 
Pope, by the taste with which he laid out his five 
acres at Twickenham, did much to banish the stiff 
Dutch style, and to encourage the modern fashion of land- 
scape-gardening in imitation of nature, which was so suc- 
cessfully carried out by the well-known Capability Brown. 
It is putting too extreme a case, when we pass to that 
which in our boyish days we all thought the perfection 
and delight of country residences, the island-cave of 
Robinson Crusoe : with its barricade of stakes which 
took root and grew into trees, and its impenetrable wilder- 
ness of wood, all planted by the exile's hand, which went 
down to the margin of the sea. It is coming nearer 
home, to pass to the French chateau ; the tower perched 
upon the rock above the Rhine ; and the German castle, 
which of course is somewhere in the Black Forest, fre- 
quented by robbers and haunted by ghosts. And we 



AND COUNTRY LIFE. 147 

ascend to the sublime in human abodes, when we think 
of the magnificent Alhambra, looking down proudly upon 
Moorish Granada : that miracle of barbaric beauty, 
which Washington Irving has so finely described : with 
its countless courts and halls, its enchanted gateways, its 
graceful pillars of marble of different hues, and its foun- 
tains that once made cool music for the dehght of Mos- 
lem prince and peer. 

We pass, by an easy transition, to the literature of 
country-houses, of which there are two well-marked clas- 
ses. We have the real and the ideal schools of the liter- 
ature of country-houses and country life : or perhaps, as 
both are in a great degree ideal, we should rather call 
them the would-be real, and the avowedly romantic. We 
have the former charmingly exemplified in Bracehridge 
Hall; charmingly in the Spectator's account of Sir 
Roger de Coverley, amid his primitive tenantry ; with a 
little characteristic coarseness, in Swift's poem, beginning, 

I've often wished that I had clear, 
For life, six hundred pounds a year, — 

which, by the way, is an imitation of that graceful Latin 
poet who delighted, so many centuries since, in his little 
Sabine farm. Then there are Miss Mitford's quiet, 
pleasing delineations of English country life ; many de- 
lightful touches of it in Friends in Council and its sequel ; 
and Samuel Rogers, though essentially a man of the 
town, has given a very complete picture of cottage life 
in his little poem, which thus sets out, 

Mine be a cot beside the hill; 
A beehive's hum shall soothe my ear: 
A willowy brook, that turns a mill. 
With many a fuU, shall linger near. 



148 CONCERNING COUNTRY HOUSES 

We mention all these, not of course, as a thousandth 
part of what our literature contains of country-houses 
and life, but as a sample of that mode of treating these 
subjects which we have termed the would-be real : and 
as specimens of the avowedly romantic way of describ- 
ing such things, we refer to Poe's gorgeous picture of the 
' Domain of Arnheim,' where his affluent imagination has 
run riot, under the stimulus of fancied boundless wealth ; 
and the same author's ' Lander's Cottage,' a scene of 
sweet simplicity, which is somewhat spoiled by just the 
smallest infusion of the theatrical. The writings of Poe, 
with all their extraordinary characteristics, are so little 
known in this country, that we dare say our readers will 
feel obliged to us for a short account of the former piece. 

A certain man, named Ellison, suddenly came into the 
possession of a fortune of a hundred millions sterling. 
Poe, you see, being wretchedly poor, did not do things by 
halves. Ellison resolved that he would find occupation 
and happiness in making the finest place in the world ; 
and he made it. The approach to Arnheim was by the 
river. After intricate windings, pursued for some hours 
through wild chasms and rocks, the vessel suddenly en- 
tered a circular basin of water, of two hundred yards in 
diameter : this basin was surrounded by hills of consider- 
able height : — 

Their sides sloped from the water's edge at an angle of some forty- 
five degrees, and they were clothed from base to summit, not a per- 
ceptible point escaping, in a drapery of the most gorgeous flower- 
blossoms: scarcely a green leaf being visible among the sea of odorous 
and fluctuating colour. This basin was of great depth, but so trans- 
parent was the water that the bottom, which seemed to consist of a 
thick mass of small round alabaster pebbles, was distinctly visible by 
glimpses, — that is to say, whenever the eye could permit itscK not to 
see, far down in the inverted heaven, the duplicate blooming of the 



AND COUNTllY LIFE. 149 

hills. On these latter there were no trees, nor even shrubs of any 
size. * * * As the eye traced upwards the myriad-tinted slope, 
from its sharp junction with the water to its vague termination amid 
the folds of overhanging cloud, it became, indeed, difficult not to 
fancy a panoramic cataract of rubies, sapphires, opals, and golden 
on^'xes, rolling silently out of tlie sky. 

Here the visitor quits the vessel which has borne him 
so far, and enters a light canoe of ivory, which is wafted 
by unseen machinery : — 

The canoe steadily proceeds, and the rocky gate of the vista is ap- 
proached, so that its depths can be more distinctly seen. To the 
right arise a chain of lofty hills, rudely and luxuriantly wooded. It 
is observed, however, that the trait of exquisite cleanness where the 
bank dips into the water still prevails. There is not one token of the 
usual river debris. To the left, the character of the scene is softer and 
more obviously artificial. Here the bank slopes upward from the 
stream in a very gentle ascent, forming a broad sward of grass of a 
texture resembling nothing so much as velvet, and of a brilliancy of 
green which would bear comparison with the tint of the purest emer- 
ald. This plateau varies in breadth from ten to three hundred yards; 
reaching from the river bank to a wall, fifty feet higli, which extends 
in an infinity of curves, but following the general direction of the 
river, until lost in the distance to the westward. This wall is of one 
continuous rock, and has been formed by cutting perpendicularly the 
once rugged precipice of the, stream's southern bank; but no trace of 
the labour has been suffered to remain. The chiselled stone has the 
hue of ages, and is profusely hung and overspread with the ivy, the 
coral honeysuckle, the eglantine, and the clematis. * * * * 

Floating gently onward, the voyager, after many shoi't turns, finds 
his progress apparently barred by a gigantic gate, or rather door, of 
burnislied gold, elaborately carved and fretted, and reflecting the di- 
rect rays of the now sinking sun with an effulgence that seems to 
wreathe the whole surrounding forest in flames. * * * The 
canoe approaches the gate. Its ponderous wings are slowly and 
musically unfolded. The boat glides between them, and commences 
a rapid descent into a vast amphitheatre entirely begirt with purple 
mountains, whose bases are laved by a gleaming river throughout the 
full extent of their circuit. Meanwhile the whole Paradise of Arn- 
heim bursts upon the view. There is a gush of entrancing melody: 
there is an oppressive sense of strange sweet odour: there is a dream- 



150 CONCERNING COUNTRY HOUSES 

like intermingling to the eye of tall, slender Eastern trees, — boskj^ 
shrubberies, — flocks of golden and crimson birds, — lily-fringed lakes, 
— meadows of violets, tulips, poppies, hyacinths, and tuberoses, — long 
intertangled lines of silver streamlets. — and, tipspringing confusedly 
from amid all, a mass of semi-Gothic, semi-Saracenic architecture, 
sustaining itself as if by miracle in mid-air, — glittering in the red 
sunlight with a hundred oriels, minarets, and pinnacles; and seeming 
the phantom handiwork, conjointly, of the Sylphs, the Fairies, the 
Genii, and the Gnomes.* 

This is certainly landscape-gardening on a grand scale : 
but the whole thing is a shade too immediately sugges- 
tive of the Arabian Nights. Why not, we are disposed 
to say, go the entire length of Aladdin's palace at once, 
and give us walls of alternate blocks of silver and gold ; 
gardens, whose trees bear fruits of diamond, emerald, 
ruby, and sapphire ; and a roc's e^^ hung up in the 
entrance-hall? Fancy a man driving up in a post-chaise 
from the railway-station to a house like that ! Why, the 
only permissible way of arriving at its front-door would 
be on an enchanted horse, that has brought one from 
Bagdad through the air ; and instead of a footman in 
spruce livery coming out to take in one's portmanteau, I 
should look to be received by a porter with an elephant's 
head, or an afrit with bats' wings. I could not go up 
comfortably to ray room to dress for dinner : and only 
fancy coming down to the drawing-room in a coat by 
Stulz and dress boots by Hoby ! Rather should we 
wreathe our brow with flowers, endue a purple robe, the 
gift of Noureddin, and perfume our handkerchief with 
odours which had formed part of the last freight of Sin- 
bad the Sailor. If we made any remark, political or 
critical, which happened to be disagreeable to our host, 

* Works of Edgar Allan Foe. Vol. I. pp. 400-403. American 
Edition. 



AND COUNTRY LIFE. 151 

of course he would immediately change us into an ape, 
and transport us a thousand leagues in a second to the 
Dry Mountains. 

But to return to the sober daylight in which ordinary 
mortals live, and to the sort of country in which a man 
may live whose fortune is less than a hundred millions, 
we have abundance of the literature of the country in 
one shape or another : poetry and poetic prose which 
profess to depict country life, and books of detail which 
profess to instruct us how to manage country concerns. 
We breathe a clear, cool atmosphere for which we are 
the better, when we turn over the pages of The Seasons : 
that is a book which never will become stale. Cowper's 
poetry is redolent of the country : and though it is all 
nonsense to say that ' God made the country and man 
made the town,' yet The Winter Walk at Noon almost 
leads us to think so. You see the Cockney's fancy that 
the country is a paradise, always in holiday guise, in poor 
Keats's lines — 

for a draught of vintage, that hath been 
Cooled for a long age in the deep-delved earth ; 

Tasting of Flora and the country green, 
Dance, and Proven9al song, and sun-burnt mirth ! 

And there are several books whose titles are sure to 
awaken pleasant thoughts in the mind of the lover of 
nature, who knows that, notwithstanding Dr. Johnson's 
axiom, one green field is not just like any other green 
field, and who prefers a country lane to Fleet-street. 
There is Mr. Jesse's Country Life, which is mainly occu- 
pied in describing, with a minute and kindly accuracy, 
the w^ays and doings of bird, beast, and insect ; and thus 
calling forth a feeling of interest in all our humble fel- 
low-creatures ; for in the case of inferior animals the 



152 CONCERNING COUNTRY HOUSES 

principle holds good, that all that is needed to make one 
like almost any of them is just to come to know them. 
And on this track one need do no more than name 
White's delightful Natural History of Selborne. There 
is Mr. William Howitt's Boy's Country Book, which sets 
out the sports and occupations of childhood and rural 
scenes, with a fulness of sympathy which makes us 
lament that its author should ever exchange these genial 
topics for the briars of polemical controversy. There is 
Mr. Willmott's Summer Time in the Country ; a disap- 
pointing book ; for notwithstanding the melody of its 
name, it is mainly a string of criticisms, good, bad, and 
indiflferent : with a slight surrounding atmosphere, indeed, 
of country life ; but most of the production might have 
been written in Threadneedle-street. There is a pleas- 
ant and well-informed little anonymous volume, called 
The Flower Garden^ which contains the substance of two 
articles originally published in the Quarterly Review ; 
and every one knows Bacon's Essay of Gardens, in 
which the writer gives the reins to his fancy, and pictures 
out a little paradise of thirty acres in extent, including in 
it some specimen of all schools of landscape gardening. 
Mrs. Loudon's various publications have done much to 
foster a taste for gardening among ladies. An exceed- 
ingly pleasing and genial book, called The Manse Gar- 
den, which has had a large circulation in Scotland, is 
intended to stimulate the Scottish clergy to neatness and 
taste in the arrangement of their gardens and glebes. A 
handsome work entitled Rustic Adornments for Homes of 
Taste, lately published, contains many practical instruc- 
tions for the decoration of the country home. And an 
elegantly illustrated volume, which appeared a few 
months ago, is given to Rhymes and Roundelays in 



AND COUNTRY LIFE. 153 

Praise of a Country Life. Sir Joseph Paxton has not 
thought it unworthy of him to write a little tract, called The 
Cottager's Calendar of Garden Operations^ the purpose 
of which is to show how much may be done in the most 
limited space in the way of growing vegetables for profit 
and flowers for ornament ; and in these days, when hap- 
pily tlie social and sanitary elevation of the masses is 
beginning to attract something of the notice which it 
deserves, I trust that reformers will not forget the pow- 
erful influence of the garden, and a taste for gardening 
concerns, in elevating and purifying the working man's 
mind, and adding interest and beauty to the working 
man's home. And in truth, we shall never succeed in 
inducing working-men to spend their evenings at home 
rather than in the alehouse, till we have succeeded in ren- 
dering their own homes tidy, comfortable, and inviting to 
a degree that shall at least equal the neatly sanded floor 
and the well-scrubbed benches which they can enjoy for 
a few pence elsewhere. 

If there be any among my readers who have it in 
view to build a country house, I strongly recommend 
them to have it done by Mr. George Gilbert Scott, 
whose pleasantly written book on Secular and Domestic 
Architecture, will be read with delight by many who are 
condemned to live in towns, or who must put up with 
Such a country home as their means permit, but who can 
luxuriate in imagining what kind of a house they would 
have if they could have exactly such a house as they 
wish. Mr. Scott is an out and out supporter of Gothic 
architecture as the best style for every possible building, 
large or small, in town or country, from the nobleman's 
palace to the labourer's cottage, fiom a cathedral or a 
town-house to a barn or a pig-sty. But Mr. Scott gives 



154 CONCERNING COUNTRY HOUSES 

a judicious view of Gothic architecture, as a style capa- 
ble of unlimited expansion and adaptation, having in its 
nature the power to accommodate itself to every require- 
ment of modern life and progress, and capable without 
surrendering its distinctive character, of modification, 
development, addition, and subtraction, to a degree which 
renders it the true architecture of the nineteenth century 
no less than of the thirteenth. It is doing Gothic archi- 
tecture great injustice to speak of it as the mediaeval 
architecture. Such a description vaguely suggests that 
it is a style especially suited to the requirements of life 
in the middle ages : and, by consequence, not well 
adapted to the exigencies of life at a period when life is 
very different from what it was in the middle ages. And 
the notion has been countenanced by the injudicious 
fashion in which houses were built at the beginning of 
the great reaction in favour of Gothic. When people 
grew wearied and disgusted at the ugly Grecian houses 
w^hich disfigure so many fine old English parks, paltry 
and pitiful importations of a foreign style into a country 
which had an indigenous style incomparably superior in 
beauty, in comfort, in every requisite of the country 
house, the reaction ran into excess ; and instead of build- 
ing Gothic houses, that is, instead of trying to produce 
buildings which should be noble and picturesque, and 
at the same time commodious and convenient to live in, 
architects built abbeys and castles ; and in those cases 
where they did not produce specimens of mere confec- 
tioner's Gothic, they produced buildings utterly unsuited 
to the exigencies and conditions of modern English life, 
however beautiful they might be. Now, nothing could 
be a more flagrant violation of the spirit of Gothic, than 
this scrupulous conformity to the letter of Gothic. The 



AND COUNTRY LIFE. 155 

true Gothic architect must hold fitness and use in view 
as his primary end ; and his skill is shown when upon 
these he superinduces beautj. A fortified castle, with 
moat and drawbridge, arrow-slits, and donjon-keep, was a 
convenient and suitable building in an unsettled and 
lawless age. It is a most inconvenient and unsuitable 
building in England in the nineteenth century ; and 
while we should prize and cherish the noble specimens 
of the Edwardian Castle which we possess, for their 
beauty and their associations, we ought to remember 
that if the architects who built them were living now, 
they would be the first to lay that stylo aside, as no 
longer suitable ; and they would show the true Gothic 
taste and spirit in devising dwellings as noble, as pic- 
turesque, as interesting, as thoroughly Gothic in charac- 
ter, but fitted for the present age, and the present age's 
modes of life. It was not because the Edwardian Castle 
was grand and beautiful, that the Edwardian architects 
built it as they did ; they built it as they did because that 
was the most suitable and convenient fashion ; and upon 
fitness and use they engrafted grandeur and beauty. 
And it is not by a slavish imitation of ancient details 
and forms that we shall succeed in producing, at the 
present day, what is justly entitled to be called Gothic 
architecture. It is rather by a free development and 
carrying out of old principles applied to new circum- 
stances and requirements. And it is the glory of Gothic, 
that you cannot make a new demand upon it for in- 
creased or altered accommodations and appliances, which 
may not, in the hand of a worthy architect, be complied 
with, not only without diminution of beauty, but even 
with increase of beauty. It is beyond comparison the 
most squeezable of all styles ; and, provided the squeez- 



156 CONCERNING COUNTRY HOUSES 

ing be effected by a master's hand, the style will look 
all the better for it. 

There is a floating belief, entirely without reason, 
that Gothic is exclusively an ecclesiastical fashion of 
building. Many people fancy that Gothic architecture 
suits a church ; but is desecrated, or at least becomes 
unsuitable, when applied to secular and domestic build- 
ings. There can be no doubt, indeed, that to every 
person who possesses any taste, it is a self-evident axiom 
that Gothic is the true church architecture : but in the 
age during which the noblest Gothic churches were 
built, it was never fancied that churches must be built in 
one style, and secular buildings in a style essentially 
dissimilar. The belief which is entertained by the true 
lover of Gothic architecture is this : that Gothic is es- 
sentially the most beautiful architecture ; that, properly 
treated, it is the most commodious architecture ; and 
that, therefore, the Gothic is the style in which all build- 
ings, sacred or secular, public or domestic, ought to be 
built ; with such modifications in the style of each sep- 
arate building as its special purpose and use shall sug- 
gest. It must be admitted, however, that Gothic archi- 
tecture has one disadvantage as compared with tliat 
architecture which is exhibited in Baker-street, in the 
London suburban terraces, and in the Manchester cotton- 
mills. Gothic architecture costs more money ; but, in 
judicious hands, not so very much more. 

As to the capacity of Gothic architecture to accommo- 
date itself to houses of all classes, let the reader ponder 
the following words : 

It seems to be generally imagined that the merits of the Elizabe- 
than style are most displayed in its grand baronial residences, such as 
Burleigh or Hatfield. I think quite the contrary. A style is best 



AND COUNTRY LIFE. 157 

tested by reducing it to its humblest conditions; and the great glory 
of this style is, not that it produced gorgeous and costly mansions 
for the nobles — but that it produced beautifully simple, j-et perfectly 
architectui-al, cottages for the poor; appropriate and comfortable 
farmhouses; and pleasant-looking residences for the smaller country- 
gentlemen, and for the inhabitants of country towns and villages. 

Following up the same idea, Mr. Scott somewhere else 
says 

What we want is a style which will stand this test — which will be 
pleasing in its most normal forms, yet be susceptible of every grada- 
tion of beauty, till it reach the noblest and most exalted objects to 
which art can aspire. 

Let it be accepted as an indubitable axiom, that Gothic 
building is the best building for the town as well as for 
the country. But I am not called to enter upon that 
controversial ground ; for we are dealing with country 
houses, in regard to which I believe there is no difference 
of opinion among people of taste and sense. The coun- 
try house, as of course, must be Gothic. Tasteless 
blockheads will no doubt say that the Gothic house is all 
frippery and gingerbread (as indeed houses of confec- 
tioner's Gothic very often are) : they will chuckle with 
delight whenever they hear that the rain has penetrated 
where the roof of a bay-window joins the wall, or 
through some ill-contrived gutter in the irregular roof of 
the house : they will maintain, in the face of fact, that 
Gothic windows will not admit sufficient light, and can- 
not exclude draughts : and they wnll praise the unpre- 
tending square-built house, ' with no nonsense about it.' 
Let us leave such tasteless people to the contemplation 
of the monstrosities they love : when the question is one 
of grace or beauty, their opinion is (as Coleridge used to 
say) 'neither here nor there.' Granting (which we do 
not grant) that Gothic architecture is out of place in the 



158 CONCERNING COUNTRY HOUSES 

town, and congenial and suitable in the country, I do not 
know that we could pay to that style any higher tribute 
than to say that it is the most seemly and suitable to be 
placed in conjunction with the fairest scenes of nature. 
I do not think we could say better of any work of man, 
than that it bears with advantage to be set side by side 
with the noblest works of God. Yet, though a worthy 
Gothic building looks beautiful anywhere, it has a special 
charm in a sweet country landscape. It seems just 
what was wanted to render the scene perfect. It is in 
harmony with the trees and flowers and hills around, and 
with the blue sky overhead. It is a perpetual pleasure 
to look at it. I do not beheve that any mortal can find 
real enjoyment in standing and gazing at a huge square 
house, with a great wagon roof, and with square holes 
cut in a great level blank wall for windows. It may 
draw a certain grandeur from vast size : and it may pos- 
sess fine accessories, — be shadowed by noble trees, 
backed by wild or wooded hills, and shaded off into 
the fields and lawns by courtly terraces ; but the big 
square box is in itself ugly, and never can be any- 
thing but ugly. But how long and delightedly one 
can contemplate the worthy Gothic house of similar pre- 
tension — with its lights and shadows, its irregular sky- 
line, its great mullioned bay-windows and its graceful 
oriels perched aloft, its many gables, its wreathed chim- 
neys, its towers and pinnacles, its hall and chapel boldly 
shown on the external outline : — for the characteristic of 
Gothic is, that it frankly exhibits construction, and makes 
a beauty of the exhibition ; while the square-box archi- 
tecture aims at concealing construction, — producing the 
four walls, pierced with the regular rows of windows, 
quite irrespective of internal requirements, and then con- 



AND COUNTRY LIFE. 150 

sidering how to fit in the requisite apartments, like the 
pieces of a child's dissected puzzle, into the square case 
made for them. Then Gothic admits, and indeed 
invites, the use of external colouring : and if that were 
only accomplished by the judicious employment of those 
bricks of different colours which have lately been brought 
to great perfection, the charm which the entire building 
possesses to please the eye is indefinitely increased. Only 
let it be remembered by every man who builds a Gothic 
country house, that it must be built with much taste and 
judgment. Gothic is an ambitious style ; and it is 
especially so in the present state of feeling in England 
with regard to it. We do not think of criticising a com- 
mon square house. The taste is never called into play 
when we look at it. It is taken for granted, a priori^ 
that it must be ugly. Not so with a Gothic house. 
There is a pretension about that. The Gothic house 
invites us to look at it ; and, of course, to form an 
opinion of it. And therefore, if it be ugly, it is offen- 
sively ugly. It aims high, and it must expect severity in 
case of failure. The square-box house comes forward 
humbly : it is a goose, and does not pretend to fly. And 
even a goose is respectable, while it keeps to its own 
line. But the ugly Gothic house is a goose that hath 
essayed the eagle's flight ; and if it come down ignomin- 
iously to the earth, it is deservedly laughed at. And so, 
let no man presume to build a country house without 
securing the services of a thoroughly good architect. 
And for myself I can say, that whenever I grow a rich 
man and build a Gothic house, the architect shall be Mr. 
Scott. Indeed a person of moderate means would be 
safe in seeking the advice of that accomplished gentle- 
man : for he would, it is evident, take pains to render 



160 CONCERNING COUNTRY HOUSES 

even a very small house a pleasing picture. He holds 
that a building of the smallest extent affords as decided 
if not as abundant scope for fine taste and careful treat- 
ment, as the grandest baronial dwelling in Britain. A cot- 
tage may be quite as pretty and pleasing as a castle or a 
palace could be in their more ambitious style. 

Although Gothic architecture has an unlimited capac- ■ 
ity of adapting itself to all circumstances and exigencies, 
yet there is a freedom about a country site which suits 
it bravely. In the country the architect is not ham- 
pered by want of space : he is not tied to a street-line 
beyond which he must not project, nor fettered by muni- 
cipal regulations as to the height or sky-outline of his 
building. He may spread over as much ground as he 
pleases. And the only restrictions by which he is con- 
fined are thus set out by Mr. Scott, in terms which will 
commend themselves to the common sense of all read- 



The grand principle of planning is, that every room should be in its 
right position — both positively and relatively to each other — to the 
approaches, views, and aspect; and that this should be so effected as 
not only to avoid disturbing architectural beauty, either within or 
without, but to be in the highest degree conducive to it. 

In treating of Buildings in the Country, Mr. Scott 
gives us some account of his ideal of houses suited to all 
ranks and degrees of men. Let us look at his picture of 
what a villa ought to be : — 

To begin, then, with the ordinary villa. Its characteristics should 
be quiet cheerfulness and unpretending comfort; it should, both 
within and without, be the very embodiment of innocent and simple 
enjoyment. No foolish affectation of rusticity, but the reality of 
evei-ything which tends to the appreciation of country pleasures in 
their more refined form. The external design should so unite itself 
with the natural objects around, that they should appear necessary 



AND COUNTRY LIFE. 161 

to one another, and that neither could be very different without the 
other suffering. The architecture should be quiet and simple; the 
material that most suited to the neighbourhood — neither too formal 
and highly finished, nor j'et too rustic. The interior should partake 
of the same general feeling. It should bear no resemblance to the 
formalit}' of a town house; the rooms should be moderate in height, 
and not too rigidly i-egular in form; some of the ceilings should show 
their timbers wholly or in part ; some of the windows should, if it suits 
the position, open out upon the garden or into conservatories. In 
most situations the house should spread wide rather than run up high; 
but circumstances may vary this. 

I ask my readers' attention to the paragraph which 
follows ; it contains sound social philosophy : — 

In this as in other classes of house-building, the servants' apart- 
ments should be well cared for. They should be allowed a fair share 
in the enjoyments pi'ovided for their masters. I have seen houses 
replete with comfort and surrounded with beauty, where, when you 
once get into the servants' rooms, you might as well be in a prison. 
This is morally wrong; let us give our dependents a share in our 
pleasures, and they will serve us none the less efficiently for it. 

Every one can see how pleasant and cheerful a home 
a villa would be which should successfully embody Mr. 
Scott's views of what a villa ought to be. Such a dwell- 
ing would be quite within the reach of all who possess 
such a measure of income as in this country now-a-days 
will suffice to provide those things which are the necessa- 
ries of life to people brought up as ladies and gentlemen. 
And with what heart and vigour a man would set himself 
to laying out the little piece of land around his house — 
to making walks, planting clumps of evergreens, and per- 
liaps leading a little brooklet through his domain — if the 
house, seen from every point, were such as to be a per- 
petual feast to the eye and the taste ! I heartily wish 
that the poorest clergyman in Britain had just such a 
parsonage as Mr. Scott has depicted, and the means of 
living in it without undue pinching and paring. 
11 



162 COXCERNING COUNTRY HOUSES 

Then, leaving the villa, Mr. Scott points out with 
great taste and moderation what the cottage should be. 
Judiciously, he does not aim at too much. It serves no 
2jood end to represent the heau ideal cottage as a build- 
ing so costly to erect and to maintain, that landlords of 
ordinary means get frightened at the mention of so ex- 
pensive a toy. Cottages may be built so as to be very 
tasteful and pleasing, while yet the expense of their 
erection is so moderate that labourers tolerably well off 
can afford to pay such a rent for them as shall render 
their erection by no means an unprofitable investment of 
money. Not, indeed, that a landlord who feels his 
responsibility as he ought, will ever desire to screw a 
profit out of his cottagers ; but it is well that it should be 
known that it need not entail any loss whatever to pro- 
vide for the working class in the country, dwellings in 
which the requirements of comfort and decency shall be 
fulfilled. The merest touch from an artistic hand is 
often all that is needed to convert an ugly, though com- 
fortable, cottage into a pretty and comfortable one. A 
cottage built of flint, dressed and reticulated with brick, 
with wood frames and mullions, and the gables of timber, 
will look exceedingly pleasing. Even of such inexpen- 
sive material as mud, thatched with reeds, a very pretty 
cottage may be built. The truth is, that nowhere is 
taste so much needed as in building with cheap materials. 
A good architect will produce a building which will form 
a pleasing picture, at as small a cost as it is possible to 
enclose a like space from the external air in the very 
ugliest way. Gracefulness of form adds nothing to the 
cost of material. And there is scope for the finest taste 
in disposing the very cheapest materials in the most efiec- 
tive and graceful fashion. I have seen a church (built, 



AND COUNTRY LIFE. 163 

indeed, by a first-rate architect) wliicli was a beautiful 
picture, both without and within, while yet it cost so 
little, that I should (if I were a betting man) be content 
to lay any odds that no mortal could produce a building 
which would protect an equal number of people from the 
weather for less money, though with unlimited licence as 
to ugliness. 

The material mud is one's ideal of the very shabbiest 
material for building which is within human reach. 
Hovel is the word that naturally goes with mud. Yet 
Mr. Scott once built a large parsonage, which cost be- 
tween two and three thousand pounds, of mud, thatched 
with reeds. Warmth was the end in view. I have no 
doubt the parsonage proved a most picturesque and quaint 
affair; and if I could find out where it is, I would go 
some distance to see it. 

Having given us his idea of what a country villa and 
a country cottage ought to be, Mr. Scott proceeds to set 
out his ideal of the home of the nobleman or great landed 
proprietor : — 

The proper expressions for a country mansion of the higher class — 
the residence of a landed proprietor — beyond that degree of dignity 
suited to the condition of the owner, ai-e perhaps, first, a friendly, ua- 
forbidding air, giving the idea of a kind of patriarchal hospitality ; a 
look that seems to invite approach rather than repel it. Secondly, an 
air which appears to connect it with the history of the country, 
and a style which belongs to it. Thirdly, a character which harmo- 
nizes well with the surrounding scenerj', and unites itself with it, as 
if not only were the best spot chosen for the house, and its natural 
beauties fostered and increased so as to render this the central focus, 
but further, that the house itself should seem to be the very thing 
which was necessary to give the last touch and finish to the scene — 
the object for which nature had prepared the site, and without which 
its charms would be incomplete. 

It is not too much to say that a very great proportion 



164 CONCERNING COUNTRY HOUSES 

of the more ambitious dwellings of this country signally 
fail of coming up to these conditions, and serve only to 
disfigure the beautiful parks in which they stand. A 
huge Palladian house entirely lacks the genial, hearty, 
inviting look of the Elizabethan or Gothic house. In- 
stead of having a look of that hospitality and welcome 
which we are proud to think of as especially English, the 
Palladian mansion is merely suggestive, as Mr. Scott 
remarks, of gamekeepers and park-rangers on the watch 
to turn all intruders out. Our author would have the 
architect who is entrusted with the building of a house of 
this class, retain in its design all that is practically useful 
and noble in the Elizabethan mansion — at the same time 
remembering that Elizabethan architecture is Gothic 
somewhat debased, and that its details, where faulty, 
should be set aside, and their place supplied by those of 
an earlier and purer period. Nor should it be forgotten 
that the purest and noblest Gothic is the most willing to 
bend itself to the requirements of altered circumstances : 
and it is therefore needful that the architect, in forming 
his plan, should hold it steadily in view that he is building 
a house which is to be inhabited by a nobleman or gentle- 
man of the latter half of the nineteenth century ; and which 
must therefore be thoroughly suited to the demands of our 
own day, and our own day's modes and habits of thought 
and life. And the castle and the abbey, though both 
quite unfit to be taken as models out-and-out, may yet 
supply hints for noble and dignified details in the design- 
ing of a modern English home. Thus, borrowing ideas 
from all quarters, Mr. Scott would produce a noble dwell- 
ing ■ — strictly Gothic in design — thoroughly English in 
its entire character — at once majestic and comfortable — 
at once dignified and inviting — with a mediaeval nobility 



AND COUNTRY LIFE. 165 

of aspect, and with the reality of every arrangement 
which our advanced civilization and increased refinement 
can require or suggest. As for lesser details, is there 
not something in the following passage which makes an 
architectural epicure's mouth water ? 

The chapel and corridors perhaps richly vaulted in stone — the hall 
nobly roofed with oak — the ceilings of the rooms either boldly show- 
ing their timbers, partially or throughout, or richly panelled with 
wood ; or if plastered, treated genuinely and truthfully, without aping 
ideas borrowed from other materials: the floors of halls and passages 
paved with stone, tile, marble, enriched with incised or tessellated 
work, or a union of all; those of the leading apartments of polished 
oak and parqueterie (the rendering of mosaic into wood); rich wain- 
scoting used where suitable, and the woodwork throughout honestly 
treated, and of character proportioned to its position, not neglecting 
the use of inlaying in the richer woods ; marble liberally used in suit- 
able positions, the plainer kinds inlaid and studiously contrasted with 
the richer; the coloured decorations, whether of walls or ceilings, or 
in stained glass, delicately and artistically treated, and of the highest 
art we can obtain, and everywhere proportioned to their position; 
historical and fresco painting freely used, and in a style at once suited 
to the architecture, and thorouglily free from what may be called 
medisevalism, in the sense in which the terra is misused to imply an 
antiquated, grotesque, or imperfect mode of drawing; all of these, and 
an infinity of other modes of ornamentation, are open to the architect 
in this class of building. 

It is pleasant to read well-written descriptions of hu- 
man dwellings in which art has done all it can do towards 
providing a pleasant and beautiful setting for human life. 
Such is Mr. Loudon's account of what he calls the heau 
ideal English Villa, in his Gyclopcedia of Rural Archi- 
tecture. Such is Mr. Scott's sketch of the heau ideal of a 
nobleman's house at the present day. The latter forms 
a pleasing companion picture to that long since drawn 
by the affluent imagination of Bacon. All who have a 
taste for such things will read it with great delight ; nor 



166 CONCERNING COUNTRY HOUSES 

will it tend in the least degree to make the true lover of 
the country envious or discontented. I can turn with 
perfect satisfaction from that grand description to my 
own little parsonage. There is a peculiar comfort and 
interest about a little place, which vanishes with increas- 
ing magnitude and magnificence. And it is a law of all 
healthy mind, that what is one's own has an attraction for 
one's self far beyond that possessed by much finer things 
which belong to another. A man with one httle country 
abode, may have more real delight in it, than a duke has 
in his wide demesnes. Indeed, I heartily pity a duke 
with half-a-score of noble houses. He can never have a 
hoyne feeling in any one of them. While the possessor 
of a few acres knows every corner and every tree and 
shrub in his little realm ; and knows what is the aspect 
of each upon every day of the year. I speak from expe- 
rience. I am the possessor of twelve acres of mother 
earth ; and I know well what pleasure and interest are to 
be found in the little affairs of that limited tract. My 
study-window looks out upon a corner of the garden ; a 
blank wall faces it at a distance of five-and-twenty feet. 
When I came here, 1 found that corner sown with pota- 
toes, and that wall a dead expanse of stone and mortar. 
But I resolved to make the most of my narrow view, and 
so contrive that it should look cheerful at every season. 
And now the corner is a little square of as soft and well- 
shaven green turf as can be seen ; through which snow- 
drops and crocuses peep in early spring ; its surface is 
broken by two clumps of evergreens, laurels, hollies, 
cedars, yews, which look warm and pleasant all the 
winter-time ; and over one clump rises a standard rose of 
ten feet in height, which, as I look up from my desk 
through my window, shows like a crimson cloud in sum- 



AND COUNTRY LIFE. 167 

mer. The blank wall is blank no more, but beautiful 
with climbing roses, honeysuckle, fuchsias, and variegated 
ivy. What a pleasure it was to me, the making of this 
little improvement ; and what a pleasure it is still every 
time I look at it ! No one can sympathize justly with 
the feeling till he tries something of the sort for himself. 
And not merely is such occupation as that which I speak 
of a most wholesome diversity from mental work. It has 
many other advantages. It leads to a more intelligent 
delight in the fairest works of the Creator ; and though 
it might be hard to explain the logical steps of the pro- 
cess, it leads a man to a more kindly and sympathetic 
feeling towards all his fellow men. Have not I, unfaith- 
ful that I am, spent the forenoon in writing a very sharp 
review of some foolish book ; and then, having gone out 
to the garden for two or three hours, come in, thinking 
that after all it would be cruel to give pain to the poor 
fellow who wrote it ; and so proceeded to weed out every- 
thing severe, and give the entire article a rather compli- 
mentary turn ! 

It is a vain fancy to try to sketch out the kind of life 
which is to be led in the country house after we get it. 
For almost every man gradually settles into a habitude 
of being which is rather formed by circumstances than 
adopted of purpose and by choice. Only let it be re- 
membered, that pleasure disappears when it is sought as 
an end. Happiness is a thing that is come upon incident- 
ally, while we are looking for something else. The man 
who would enjoy country life in a country home, must 
have an earnest occupation besides the making and de- 
lighting in his home, and the sweet scenes which sur- 
round it. If that be all he has to do, he will soon turn 



168 CONCERNING COUNTRY HOUSES. 

weary, and find that life, and the interest of life, have 
stagnated and scummed over. The end of work is to en- 
joy leisure; but to enjoy leisure one must have performed 
work. It will not do to make the recreation of life the 
business of life. But I believe, that to the man who has 
a worthy occupation to fill up his busy hours, there is no 
purer or more happy recreation than may be found in the 
cares and interests of the country home. 



CHAPTER VI. 
CONCERNING TIDINESS : 

BEING THOUGHTS UPON AN OVERLOOKED SOURCE OF 
HUMAN CONTENT. 




AID Sydney Smith to a lady who asked him 
to recommend a remedy for low spirits, — 
Always have a cheerful, bright fire, a kettle 
simmering on the hob, and a paper of sugar- 
plums on the mantlepiece. 

Modern grates, it is known, have no hobs; nor does it 
clearly appear for what purpose the kettle was recom- 
mended. If for the production of frequent cups of tea, 
I am not sure that the abundant use of that somewhat ner- 
vous and vaporous liquid is likely to conduce to an equa- 
ble cheerfulness. And Sydney Smith, although he must 
have become well acquainted with whisky-toddy during 
his years in Edinburgh, would hardly have advised a 
lady to have recourse to alcoholic exhilaration, with its 
perilous tendencies and its subsequent depression. Sugar- 
plums, again, damage the teeth, and produce an effect the 
reverse of salutary upon a most important organ, whose 
condition directly affects the spirits. As for the bright 
fire, there the genial theologian was certainly right : for 
when we talk, as we naturally do, of a cJieerful fire, we 
testify that long experience has proved that this peculiar- 



170 CONCERNING TIDINESS. 

ly British institution tends to make people cheerful. But, 
without committing myself to any approval of the par- 
ticular things recommended by Sydney Smith, I heartily 
assent to the principle which is implied in his advice to 
the nervous lady : to wit, that cheerfulness and content 
are to a great degree the result of outward and physical 
conditions ; let me add, the result of very little things. 

Time was, in which happiness was regarded as being 
perhaps too much a matter of one's outward lot. Such 
is the belief of a primitive age and an untutored race. 
Every one was to be happy, whatever his mental condi- 
tion, who could but find admittance to Rasselas' Hapjyy Val- 
ley. The popular belief that there might be a scene so fair 
that it would make blest any human being who should be 
allowed to dwell in it, is strongly shown in the name uni- 
versally given to the spot which was inhabited by the par- 
ents of the race before evil was known. It was the 
Garden of Delight : and the name describes not the beauty 
of the scene itself, but the effect it would produce upon 
the mind of its tenants. The paradises of all rude na- 
tions are places which profess to make every one happy 
who enters them, quite apart from any consideration of 
the world which he might bear within his own breast. 
And the pleasures of these paradises are mainly ad- 
dressed to sense. The gross Esquimaux went direct to 
eating and drinking : and so his heaven (if we may be- 
lieve Dr. Johnson) is a place where ' oil is always 
fresh, and provisions always warm.' He could conceive 
nothing loftier than the absence of cold meat, and the 
presence of unlimited blubber. Quite as gross was the 
Paradise of the Moslem, with its black-eyed houris, and 
its musk-sealed wine : and the same principle, that the 
outward scene and circumstances in which a man is placed 



CONCERNING TIDINESS. 171 

are able to make him perfectly and unfailingly happy, 
whatever he himself may be, is taken for granted in all 
we are told of the Scandinavian Valhalla, the Amenti of 
the old Egyptian, the Peruvian's Spirit- World, and the 
Red Man's Land of Souls. But the Christian Heaven, 
with deeper truth, is less a locality than a character : its 
happiness being a relation between the employments pro- 
vided, and the mental condition of those who engage in 
them. It was a grand and a noble thing, too, when a 
Creed came forth, which utterly repudiated the notion of 
a Fortunate Island, into which, after any life you liked, 
you had only to smuggle yourself, and all was well. It 
was a grand thing, and an intensely practical thing, to 
point to an unseen world, which will make happy the 
man who is prepared for it, and who is fit for it; and no 
one else. 

And, to come down to the enjoyments of daily life, 
the time was when happiness was too much made a thing 
of a quiet home, of a comfortable competence, of climbing 
roses and honeysuckle, of daisies and buttercups, of new 
milk and fresh eggs, of evening bells and mist stealing 
up from the river in the twilight, of warm firesides, and 
close-drawn curtains, and mellow lamps, and hissing urns, 
and cups of tea, and easy chairs, and old songs, and 
plenty of books, and laughing girls, and perhaps a gentle 
wife and a limited number of peculiarly well-behaved 
chiklren. And indeed it cannot be denied that if these 
things, with health and a good conscience, do not neces- 
sarily make a man contented, they are very likely to do 
so. One cannot but sympathize with the spirit of snugness 
and comfort which breathes from Cowper's often-quoted 
lines, though there is something of a fiillacy in them. 
Here they are again : they are pleasant to look at : — 



172 CONCERNING TIDINESS. 

Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast, 
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round. 
And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn 
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups 
That cheer, but not inebriate, wait on each, 
So let us welcome peaceful evening in. 

I have said there is a fallacy in these lines. It is not 
that they state anything which is not quite correct, but 
that they contain a suggestio falsi. Although Cowper 
does not directly say so, you see he leaves on your mind 
the impression that if all these arrangements are made 
— the fire stirred, the curtains drawn, the sofa wheeled 
round, and so forth — you are quite sure to be extremely 
jolly, and to spend a remarkably pleasant evening. Now 
the fact is quite otherwise. You may have so much 
anxiety and care at your heart, as shall entirely neutral- 
ize the natural tendency of all these little bits of outward 
comfort ; and no one knew that better than the poor 
poet himself. But that which Cowper does but insinu- 
ate, an unknown verse-writer boldly asserts : to wit, that 
outward conditions are able to make a man as happy as it 
is possible for man to be. He writes in the style which 
was common a couple of generations back : but he really 
makes a pleasant homely picture : — 

The hearth was clean, the fire was clear, 

The kettle on for tea; 
Palemon in his elbow-chair, 

As blest as man could be. 

Clarinda, who his heart possessed, 

And was his new-made bride. 
With head reclined upon his breast, 

Sat toying by his side. 

Stretched at his feet, in happy state, 
A favourite dog was laid, 



CONCERNING TIDINESS. 173 

By whom a little sportive cat, 
In wanton humour played. 

Clarinda's hand he gently pressed: 

She stole a silent kiss ; 
And, blushing, modestly confessed 

The fulness of her bliss. 

Palemon, with a heart elate, 

Prayed to Almighty Jove, 
That it might ever be his fate. 

Just so to live and love. 

Be this eternity, he cried. 

And let no more be given ; 
Continue thus my loved fireside, — 

I ask no other heaven ! 

Poor fellow ! It is very evident that he had not been 
married long. And it is charitable to attribute the won- 
derful extravagance of his sentiments to temporary 
excitement and obfuscation. But without saying any- 
thing of his concluding wish, which appears to border on 
the profane, we see in his verses the expression of the 
rude belief that, given certain outward circumstances, a 
man is sure to be happy. 

Perhaps the pendulum has of late years swung rather 
too far in the opposite direction, and we have learned to 
make too little of external things. No doubt the true 
causes of happiness are inter prcecordia. No doubt it 
touches us most closely, whether the world within the 
breast is bright or dark. No doubt content, happiness, 
our being's end and aim, call it what you will, is an 
inward thing, as was said long ago by the Latin poet, in 
words which old Lord Auchinleck (the father of John- 
son's Boswell) inscribed high on the front of the mansion 
which he built amid tlie Scottish woods and rocks ' where 
Lugar flows : ' — 



174 CONCERNING TIDINESS. 

Quod petis, hie est ; 
Est Ulubris: animus si te non deficit jequus. 

But then the question is, how to get the animus cequus : 
and I think that now-a-days there is with some a disposi- 
tion to push the principle of 

My mind to me a kingdom is, 

too far. Happiness is indeed a mental condition, but we 
are not to forget that mental states are very strongly, 
very directly, and very regularly affected and produced 
by outward causes. In the vast majority of men outward 
circumstances are the great causes of inward feelings, and 
you can count almost as certainly upon making a man 
jolly by placing him in happy circumstances, as upon 
making a man wet by dipping him in water. And I be- 
lieve a life which is too subjective is a morbid thing. It 
is not healthy nor desirable that the mind's shadow and 
sunshine should come too much from the mind itself. I 
believe that when this is so, it is generally the result of 
a weak physical constitution : and it goes along with a 
poor appetite and shaky nerves : and so I hail Sydney 
Smith's recommendation of sugar-plums, bright fires, and 
simmering kettles, as the recognition of the grand princi- 
ple that mental moods are to a vast extent the result of 
outward conditions and of physical state. If Macbeth 
had asked Dr. Forbes Winslow the question — 
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased V 

that eminent physician would instantly have replied, — 
' Of course I can, by ministering to a body diseased.' No 
doubt such mental disease as Macbeth's is beyond the 
reach of opiate or purgative, and neither sin nor remorse 
can be cured by sugar-plums. But as for the little de- 
pressions and troubles of daily life, I believe that Sydney 



CONCERNING TIDINESS. 175 

Smith proposed to treat them soundly. Treat them 
physically. Treat them ah extra. Don't expect the 
mind to originate much good for itself. With common- 
place people it is mainly dependent upon external influ- 
ences. It is not a perennial fountain, but a tank which 
must be replenished from external springs. For myself, 
I never found my mind to be to me a kingdom. If a 
kingdom at all, it was a very sterile one, and a very un- 
ruly one. I have generally found myself, as my readers 
have no doubt sometimes done, a most wearisome and 
stupid companion. If any man wishes to know the con- 
sequence of being left to his own mental resources, let 
him shut himself up for a week, without books or writing 
materials or companions, in a chamber lighted from the 
roof. He will be very sick of himself before the week is 
over : he will (1 speak of commonplace men) be in toler- 
ably low spirits. The effect of solitary confinement, we 
know upon uneducated prisoners, is to drive them mad. 
And not only do outward circumstances mainly make and 
unmake our cheerfulness, but they affect our intellectual 
powers just as powerfully. They spur or they dull us. 
Till you enjoy, after long deprivation, the blessing of con- 
verse with a man of high intellect and cultivation, you do 
not know how much there is in you. Your powers are 
stimulated to produce thought of which you would not 
have believed yourself capable. And have not you felt, 
dear reader, when in the society of a blockhead, that you 
became a blockhead too ? Did you not feel your mind 
sensibly conti'acting, like a ball of india-rubber, when 
compressed by the dead weight of the surrounding atmos- 
phere of stupidity ? But when you had a quiet evening 
with your friend Dr. Smith, or Mr. Jones, a brilliant 
talker, did he not make you talk too with (comparative) 



176 CONCERNING TIDINESS. 

brilliancy ? You found yourself saying much cleverer 
things than you had been able to say for months past. 
The machinery of your mind played fervidly ; words 
came fittingly, and thoughts came crowding. The fric- 
tion of two minds of a superior class, will educe from 
each much finer thought than either could have produced 
when alone. 

And now, my friendly reader, the upshot of all this 
which I have been saying is, that I desire to recommend 
to you a certain overlooked and undervalued thing, which 
I believe to be a great source of content and a great keep- 
er-off of depression. I desire to recommend something 
which I think ought to supplant Sydney Smith's kettle 
and sugar-plums, and which may co-exist nicely with his 
cheerful fire. And I beg the reader to remark what the 
end is towards which I am to prescribe a means. It is 
not suprema felicitas : it is quiet content. The happiness 
which we expect at middle age is a calm, homely thing. 
We don't want raptures : they weary us. they wear us 
out, they shatter us. We want quiet content ; and 
above all, we want to be kept clear of over-anxiety and 
of causeless depression. As for such buoyancy as that of 
Sydney Smith himself, who tells us that when a man of 
forty he often longed to jump over the tables and chairs 
in pure glee and light-heartedness, — why, if nature has 
not given you that, you must just do without it. Art can- 
not give it you : it must come spontaneous if it come at all. 
But what a precious thing it is ! Very truly did David 
Hume say, that for a man to be born with a fixed dispo- 
sition always to look at the bright side of things, was a 
far happier thing than to be born to a fortune of ten 
thousand a year. But Hume was right, too, when he 
talked of being horn with such a disposition. The hope- 



CONCERNING TIDINESS. 177 

ful, unanxious man, quite as truly as the poet, nascitur, 
non fit. No training could ever have made the nervous, 
shrinking, evil-foreboding Charlotte Bronte like the glee- 
ful, boisterous, life-enjoying Christopher North. There 
were not pounds enough in that little body to keep up a 
spirit like that which dwelt in the Scotch Professor's 
stalwart frame. And to indicate a royal road to constant 
light-heartedness is what no man in his senses will pre- 
tend to do. But we may attain to something humbler. 
Sober content is, I believe, within the reach of all who 
have nothing graver to vex them than what James Mont- 
gomery the poet called the '• insect cares ' of daily life. 
There may be, of course, lots which are darkened over 
by misfortunes so deep that to brighten them all human 
skill would be unavailing. But ye who are commonplace 
people, — commonplace in understanding, in feeling, in 
circumstances ; ye who are not very clever, not extraor- 
dinarily excitable, not extremely unlucky ; ye who de- 
sire to be, day by day, equably content and even pass- 
ably cheerful ; listen to me while I recommend, in sub- 
ordination of course to something too serious to discuss 
upon this half-earnest page, the maintenance of a con- 
stant, pervading, active, all-reacliing, energetic Tidi- 
ness ! 

No fire that ever blazed, no kettle that ever simmered, 
no sugar-plums that ever corroded the teeth and soothed 
to tranquil stupidity, could do half as much to maintain a 
human being in a condition of moderate jollity and satis- 
faction, as a daily resolute carrying out of the resolution, 
that everything about us, — our house, our wardrobe, our 
books, our papers, our study-table, our garden-walks, our 
carriage, our harness, our park-fences, our children, our 
lamps, our gloves, yea, our walking-stick and our um- 

12 



178 CONCERNING TIDINESS. 

brella, shall be in perfectly accurate order ; that is, shall 
be, to a hair's breadth, Right ! 

If you, my reader, get up in the morning, as you are 
very likely to do in this age of late dinners, somewhat 
out of spirits, and feeling (as boys expressively phrase it), 
rather down in the mouth, you cannot tell why ; if you 
take your bath and dress, having still the feeling as if the 
day had come too soon, before you had gathered up heart 
to face it and its duties and troubles ; and if, on coming 
down stairs, you find your breakfast-parlour all in the 
highest degree snug and tidy, — the fire blazing brightly 
and warmly, the fire-irons accurately arranged, the 
hearth clean, the carpet swept, the chairs dusted, the 
breakfast equipage neatly arranged upon the snow-white 
cloth, — it is perfectly wonderful how all this will bright- 
en you up. You will feel that you would be a growling 
humbug if you did not become thankful and content. 
'• Order is Heaven's first law : ' and there is a sensible 
pleasure attending the carrying of it faithfully out to the 
smallest things. Tidiness is nothing else than the carry- 
ing into the hundreds of little matters which meet us 
and touch us hour by hour, the same grand principle 
which directs the subliraest magnitudes and affairs of the 
universe. Tidiness is, in short, the being right in thou- 
sands of small concerns in which most men are slovenly 
satisfied to be wrong. And though a hair's breadth may 
make the difference between right and wrong, the differ- 
ence between right and wrong is not a little difference. 
An untidy person is a person who is wrong, and is doing 
wrong, for several hours every day ; and though the 
wrong may not be grave enough to be indicated by a 
power so solemn as conscience (as the current through 
the Atlantic cable after it had been injured, though a 



CONCERNING TIDINESS. 179 

magnetic current, was too faint to be indicated by the 
machines now in use), still, constant wrong-doing, in how- 
ever slight a degree, cannot be without a jar of the 
entire moral nature. It cannot be witliout putting us out 
of harmony with the entire economy under which we 
live. And thus it is that the most particular old bache- 
lor, or the most precise old maid, who insists upon every- 
thing about the house being in perfect order, is, in so far, 
co-operating with the great plan of Providence ; and, hke 
every one who does so, finds an innocent pleasure result 
from that unintended harmony. Tidiness is a great 
source of cheerfulness. It is cheering, I have said, even 
to come into one's breakfast room, and find it spotlessly 
tidy ; but still more certainly will this cheerfulness come 
if the tidiness is the result of our own exertion. 

And so I counsel you, my friend, if you are ever dis- 
heartened about some example which has been pressed 
upon you of the evil which there is in this world ; if you 
get vexed and worried and depressed about some evil in 
the government of your country, or of your county, or of 
your parish ; if you have done all you can to think how 
the evil may be remedied ; and if you know that further 
brooding over the subject would only vex and sting and 
do no good ; — if all this should ever be so, then I coun- 
sel you to have resort to the great refuge of Tidiness. 
Don't sit over your library fire, brooding and bothering ; 
don't fly to sugar-plums, they will not avail. There is a 
corner of one of your fields that is grown up with net- 
tles ; there is a bit of wall or of palisade out of repair ; 
there is a yard of the edging of a shrubbery walk where 
an overhanging laurel has killed the turf; there is a bed 
in the garden which is not so scrupulously tidy as it 
ought to be ; there is a branch of a peach-tree that has 



180 CONCERNING TIDINESS. 

pulled out its fastenings to the wall, and that is flapping 
about in the wind. Or there is a drawer of papers 
which has for weeks been in great confusion ; or a 
division of your bookcase where the books might be bet- 
ter arranged. See to these things forthwith : the out-of- 
door matters are the best. Get your man-servant — all 
yoiir people, if you have half-a-dozen — and go forth and 
see things made tidy : and see that they are done thor- 
oughly; work half done will not serve for our present 
purpose. Let every nettle be cut down and carried off 
from the neglected corner ; then let the ground be dug 
up and levelled, and sown with grass seed. If it rains, 
so much the better : it will make the seed take root at 
once. Let the wall or fence be made better than when 
it was new ; let a wheelbarrow-full of fresh green turf 
be brought ; let it be laid down in place of the decayed 
edging ; let it be cut accurately as a watch's machinery ; 
let the gravel beside it be raked and rolled : then put 
your hands in your pockets and survey the effect with 
delight. All this will occupy you, interest you, dirty 
you, for a couple of hours, and you will come in again to 
your library fireside quite hopeful and cheerful. The 
worry and depression will be entirely gone ; you will see 
your course beautifully : you have sacrificed to the good 
genius of Tidiness, and you are rewarded accordingly. I 
am simply stating phenomena, my reader. I don't pre- 
tend to explain causes ; but I hesitate not to assert, that 
to put things right, and to know that things are put 
right, has a wonderful effect in enlivening and cheering. 
You cannot tell why it is so ; but you come in a very differ- 
ent man from what you were when you went out. You 
see things in quite another way. You wonder how you 
could have plagued yourself so much before. We 



CONCERNING TIDINESS. 181 

all know that powerful effects are often produced upon 
our minds by causes which have no logical connexion 
with these effects. Change of scene helps people to get 
over losses and disa})pointments, though not by any pro- 
cess of logic. If the fact that Anna Maria cruelly 
jilted you, thus consigning you to your present state 
of single misery, was good reason why you should be 
snappish and sulky in Portland-place, is it not just as 
good reason now, when, in the midst of a tag-rag proces- 
sion you are walking into Chamouni after having climbed 
Mont Blanc? The state of the facts remains precisely 
as before. Anna Maria is married to Mr. Dunderhead, 
the retired ironmonger with ten thousand a year. Nor 
have any new arguments been suggested to you beyond 
those which Smith good-naturedly addressed to you in 
Lincoln's Inn-square, when you threatened to punch his 
head. But you have been up Mont Blanc; you have 
nearly fallen into a crevasse ; your eyes are almost 
burnt out of your head. You have looked over that sea 
of mountains which no one that has seen will ever forget : 
here is your alpen-stock, and you shall carry it home 
with you as an ancient palmer his faded branch from the 
Holy Land. And though all this has nothing earthly to 
do with your disappointment, you feel that somehow all 
this has tided you over it. You are quite content. You 
don't grudge Anna Maria her ferruginous happiness. 
You are extremely satisfied that things have turned out 
as they did. The sale of nails, pots, and gridirons is a 
legitimate and honourable branch of commercial enter- 
prise. And INIr. Dunderhead, with all that money, must 
be a worthy and able man. 

I am writing, I need hardly say, for ordinary people 



182 CONCERNING TIDINESS. 

when I suggest Tidiness as a constant source of temper- 
ate satisfaction. Of course great and heroic men are 
above so prosaic a means of content. Such amiable 
characters as Roderick Dhu, in the Lady of the Lake, 
as Byron's Giaour and Lara, not to name Childe Har- 
old, as the heroes of Locksley Hall and Maud, and Mr. 
Bailey's Festus, would no doubt receive my humble 
suggestions very much as Mynheer Van Dunk, who 
disposed of his two quarts of brandy daily, might be sup- 
posed to receive the advice to substitute for his favourite 
liquor an equal quantity of skimmed milk. And pos- 
sibly Mr. Disraeli would not be content out of office, 
however orderly and tidy everything about his estate 
and his mansion might be. Yet it is upon record that a 
certain ancient emperor, who had ruled the greatest 
empire this world ever saw, found it a pleasant change 
to lay the sceptre and the crown aside, and, descending 
from the throne, to take to cultivating cabbages. And 
as he looked at the tidy rows and the bunchy heads, he 
declared that he had changed his condition for the bet- 
ter ; that tidiness in a cabbage-garden could make a man 
happier than the imperial throne of the Roman Empire. 
It is well that it should be so, as in this world there are 
many more cabbage-gardens than imperial thrones ; and 
tidiness is attainable by many by whom empire is not 
attainable. 

A disposition towards energetic tidiness is a perennial 
source of quiet satisfaction. It always provides us with 
something to think of and to do : it affords scope for a 
little ingenuity and contrivance : it carries us out of 
ourselves : and prevents our leading an unheathily sub- 
jective life. It gratifies the instinctive love of seeing 
things right which is in the healthy human being. And it 



CONCERNING TIDINESS. 183 

is founded upon the philosophical fact, that there is a 
peculiar satisfaction in having a thing, great or small, 
which was wrong, put right. You have greater pleasure 
in such a thing, when it has been fairly set to rights, 
than if it never had been wrong. Had Brummell been 
a philosopher instead of a conceited and empty-pated 
coxcomb, I should at once have understood, when he 
talked of * his favourite leg,' that he meant a leg which 
had been fractured, and then restored as good as ever. 
Is it a suggestion too grave for this place, that this prin- 
ciple of the peculiar interest and pleasure which are felt 
in an evil remedied, a spoiled thing mended, a wrong 
righted, may cast some light upon the Divine dealing 
with this world ? It is fallen indeed, and evil : but it 
will be set right. And then, perhaps, it may seem better 
to its Almighty Maker than even on the First Day of 
Rest. And the human being who systematically keeps 
right, and sets right, all things, even the smallest, within 
his own little dominion, enjoys a pleasure which has a 
dignified foundation ; which is real, simple, innocent, and 
lasting. Never say that it is merely the fidgety par- 
ticularity of an old bachelor which makes him impatient 
of suffering a weed or a withered leaf on his garden 
walk, a speck of dust on his library table, or a volume 
turned upside down on his shelves. He is testifying, 
perhaps unconsciously, to the grand, sublime, impassable 
difference between Right and Wrong. He is a humble 
combatant on the side of Right. He is maintaining a 
little outpost of the lines of that great army which is 
advancing with steady pace, conquering and to conquer. 
And if the quiet satisfaction he feels comes from an un- 
exciting and simple source — why, it is just from such 
sources that the quiet content of daily life must come. 



184 CONCERNING TIDINESS. 

We cannot, from the make of our being, be always or be 
long in an excitement. Such things wear us and them- 
selves out : and they cannot last. The really and sub- 
stantially happy people of this w^orld are always calm 
and quiet. In feverish youth, of course, young people 
get violently spoony, and are violently ambitious. Then, 
life is to be all romance. They are to live in a world 
over which there spreads a light such as never was on 
land or sea. They think that Thekla was right when 
she said, as one meaning that life, for her, was done, ' I 
have lived and loved ! ' Mistaken she ! The solid work of 
life was then just beginning. She had just passed through 
the moral scarlet-fever; and the noblest, greatest, and 
happiest part of life was to come. And as for the dream 
of ambition, that soon passes away. A man learns to 
work, not to make himself a famous name, but to pro- 
vide the wherewithal to pay his butcher's and his grocer's 
bills. Still, wdio does not look back on that time with 
interest ! Was it indeed ourselves, now so sobered, 
grave, and matter-of-fact, whom we see as we look back ? 

Make me feel the wild pulsation that I felt before the strife, 
When I heard my days before me, and the tnmult of my life; 

Yearning for the large excitement which the coming years would 

yield, 
Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father's field, 

And at night along the dusky highway near and nearer drawn, 
Sees in heaven the light of London flaring like a dreary dawn. 

But just what London proves to the eager-hearted boy, 
life proves to the man. He intended to be Lord Clian- • 
cellor : he is glad by-and-bye to get made an Lisolvent 
Commissioner. He intended to be a millionaire : he is 
glad, after some toiling years, to be able to pay his house- 



CONCERNING TIDINESS. 185 

rent and make the ends meet. He intended to startle 
the quiet district of his birth, and make his mother's 
heart proud with the story of his fame : he learns to be 
glad if he does his home no discredit, and can now and 
then send his sisters a ten-pound note : — 

So sleeps the pride of former days, 

So glory's thrill is o'er: 
And hearts that once beat high for praise, 

Now feel that pulse no more ! 

But though these excitements be gone, there still 
remains to the middle-aged man the calm pleasure of 
looking at the backs of the well-arranged volumes on his 
book-shelves ; of seeing that his gravel-walks are nicely 
raked, and his grass-plots smoothly mown ; of having his 
cairiage, his horses, and his harness in scrupulous order ; 
the liarness with the silver so very bright and the leather 
so extremely black, and the horses with their coats so 
shiny, their ribs so invisible, and all their corners so 
round. Now, my reader, all tliese little things will ap- 
pear little only to very unthinking people. From such 
little things comes the quiet content of commonplace mid- 
dle life, of matter-of-fact old age. I never admired or 
liked anything about Lord Melbourne so much as that 
which I shall now tell you in much better words than my 
own : — 

He went one night to a minor theati-e, in company with two ladies 
and a fashionable young fellow about town — a sort of man not easy 
to be pleased. 

The performance was (hill and trashy enough, I daresay. The next 
day Lord Melbourne called upon the ladies. The fashionable young 
gentleman had been there before his lordship, and had been complain- 
ing of the dreadfully dull evening they had all passed. The ladies 
mentioned this to Lord Melbourne. ' Not pleased ! Not pleased ! 
Confound the man! Didn't he see the fishmongers' shops, and the 



186 CONCERNING TIDINESS. 

gas-lights flashing from the lobsters' backs, as we drove along? 
Wasn't that happiness enough for him? ' 

Lord Melbourne had then ceased to be Prime Minister, but you 
see he had not ceased to take pleasure in any little thing that could 
give it.* 

Now, is not all this an admirable illustration of my 
great principle, that the tranquil enjoyment of life comes 
to be drawn a good deal from external sources, and a 
great deal more from very little things ? An ex-Prime 
Minister thought that the sight of lobsters' backs shining 
in the gas-light, was quite enough to make a reasonable 
man content for one evening. But give me, say I, not 
the fleeting joy of the lobsters' backs, any more than 
Sydney Smith's sugar-plums, lazy satisfactions partaken 
in passiveness. Give me the perennial, calm, active, stim- 
ulating; moral and intellectual content which comes of 
living amid hundreds of objects and events which are all 
scrupulously Right ; and thus, let us all (as Words- 
worth would no doubt have written had I pressed the 
matter upon him) 

feed this mind of ours, 
In a wise Tidiness! 

I have long wished to write an essay on Tidiness ; for 
it appears to me that the absence of this simple and 
humble quality is the cause of a considerable part of all 
the evil and suffering, physical and moral, which exist 
among ordinary folk in this world. Most of us, my read- 
ers, are little people ; and so it is not surprising that our 
earthly comfort should be at the mercy of little things. 
But even if we were, as vsome of us probably think our- 
selves, very great and eminent people, not the less would 
our content be liable to be disturbed by very small mat- 

* ' Friends in Council Abroad.' Fraser's Magazine, vol. liii. p. 2. 
(January, 1856.) 



CONCERNING TIDINESS. 187 

ters. A few gritty grains of sand finding their way amid 
the polished shafts and axles of some great piece of ma- 
chinery, will suffice to send a jar through it all ; and a 
single drop of a corroding acid falling ceaselessly upon a 
bright surface will speedily ruin its brightness. And in 
the life of many men and women, the presence of that 
physical and mental confusion and discomfort which 
result from the absence of tidiness, is just that dropping 
acid, those gritty particles. I do not know why it is 
that by the constitution of this universe, evil has so much 
more power than good to produce its effect and to propa- 
gate its nature. One drop of foul will pollute a whole 
cup of fair water ; but one drop of fair water has no 
power to appreciably improve a cup of foul. Sharp 
pain, present in a tooth or a toe, will make the whole 
man miserable, though all the rest of his body be easy ; 
but if all the rest of the body be suffering, an easy toe or 
tooth will cause no perceptible alleviation. And so a 
man with an easy income, with a pretty house in a 
pleasant neighbourhood, with a good-tempered wife and 
healthy children, may quite well have some little drop of 
bitterness day by day infused into his cup, which will 
take away the relish of it all. And this bitter drop, I 
believe, in the lot of many men, is the constant existence 
of a domestic muddle. 

And yet, practically important as I believe the subject 
to be, still one rather shrinks from the formal diseu?;sion 
of it. It is not a dignified matter to write about. The 
name is naturally suggestive of a sour old maid, a precise 
old bacheldor, a vinegar-faced schoolmistress, or at best 
a plump and bustling house-maid. To some minds the 
name is redolent of worry, fault-finding, and bother. 
Every one can see that it is a fine thing to discuss the 



188 CONCERNING TIDINESS. 

laws and order of great things, — such as comets, plan- 
ets, empires, and great cities ; things, in short, with which 
we have very little to do. And why should law and or- 
der appear contemptible just where they touch ourselves ? 
Is it as the ocean, clear and clean in its distant depths, 
grows foul and turbid just where it touches the shore ? 
That which we call law and order when affecting things 
far away, becomes tidiness where it reaches us. Yet it 
is not a dignified topic for an essay. 

This is a beautiful morning. It is the morning of one of 
the last days of September, but the trees, with the excep- 
tion of some of the sycamores and limes, are as green 
and thick-leaved as ever. The dew lies thick upon the 
grass, and the bright morning sun turns it to glancing 
gems. The threads of gossamer among the evergreen 
leaves look like necklaces for Titania. The crisp air, 
just touched with frostiness, is exhilarating. The dahlias 
and hollyhocks are bright, but the frost will soon make 
an end of the former. The swept harvest-fields look 
trim, and the outline of the distant hills shows sharp 
against the blue sky. Taking advantage of the moisture 
on the grass, the gardener is busy mowing it. Curious, 
that though it sets people's teeth on edge to listen to the 
sharpening of edge-tools in general, yet there is some- 
thing that is extremely pleasing in the whetting of a 
scythe. It had better be a little way off. But it is 
suggestive of fresh, pleasant things ; of dewy grass and 
bracing morning air ; of clumps of trees standing still in 
the early mistiness ; of ' milkmaids singing blythe.' Let 
us thank Milton for the last association : we did not get 
it from daily life. I never heard a milkmaid singing ; in 
this part of the country I don't think they do sing ; and 
I believe cows are invariably miJked within doors. But 



CONCERNING TIDINESS. 189 

now, how pleasant the trim look of that newly-mown lawn, 
so carefully swept and rolled ; there is not a dandelion in 
it at all, — no weed whatsoever. There are indeed abun- 
dant daisies, for though I am assured that daisies in a lawn 
are weeds, I never shall recognise them as such. To me 
they shall always be flowers, and welcome everywhere. 
Look too, at the well-defined outline of the grass against 
the gravel. I feel the joy of tidiness, and I gladly write 
in its praise. 

Looking at this grass and gravel, I think of Mr. Ten- 
nyson. I remember a little poem of his which contains 
some description of his home. There, he tells us, the 
sunset falls 

All round a careless-ordered garden, 
Close by the ridge of a noble down. 

I lament a defect in that illustrious man. Great is my 
reverence for the author of Maud ; great for the author 
of Lochsley Hall and the May Queen ; greatest of all 
for the author of hi Memoriam: but is^ it possible that 
the Laureate should be able to elaborate his verses to 
that last and most exquisite perfection, while thinking of 
weedy walks outside his windows, of unpruned shrubs, 
and fruit-trees fallen from the walls ? Must the thought 
be admitted to the mind, that Mr. Tennyson is not tidy ? 
I know not. I never saw his garden. Rather let me be- 
lieve that these lines only show how tidy he is. Perhaps 
this garden would appear in perfect order to the visitor ; 
perhaps it seems ' careless-ordered ' only to his own sharp 
eye. Perhaps he discerns a weed here and there ; a 
blank of an inch length in a boxwood edging. Perhaps, 
like lesser men, he cannot get his servants to be as tidy 
as himself. No doubt such is the state of matters. 



190 CONCERNING TIDINESS. 

There are, indeed, many degrees in the scale of tidi- 
ness. It is a disposition that grows upon one, and some- 
times becomes ahnost a bondage. Some great musical 
composer said, shortly before he died, that he was only 
then beginning to get an insight into the capabilities of 
his art ; and I dare say a similar idea has occasionally 
occurred to most persons endowed with a very keen 
sense of order. In matters external, tidiness may go to 
the length of what we read of Broek, that Dutch para- 
dise of scrubbing-brushes and new paint; in matters 
metaphysical, it may go the length of what John Foster 
tells us of himself, when his fastidious sense of the exact 
sequence of every shade of thought compelled him to 
make some thousands of corrections and improvements 
in revising a dozen printed pages of his own composi- 
tion. Tidiness is in some measure a matter of natural 
temperament ; there are human beings who never could 
by possibility sit down contentedly, as some can, in a 
chamber where everything is topsy-turvy, and who never 
could by possibility have their affairs, their accounts, 
their books and papers, in that inextricable confusion in 
which some people are quite satisfied to have theirs. 
There may, indeed, be such a thing as that a man shall 
be keenly alive to the presence or absence of order in 
his belongino^s, but at the same time so nerveless and 
washy that he cannot bestir himself and set things to 
rights ; but as a general rule, the man who enjoys order 
and exactness will take care to have them about him. 
There are people who never go into a room but they see 
at a glance if any of its appointments are awry; and 
the impression is precisely that which a discordant note 
leaves on a musical ear. A friend of mine, not an eccle- 
siastical architect, never enters any church without de- 



CONCERNING TIDINESS. 191 

vising various alterations in it. The same person, when 
he enters his hbrary in the morning, cannot be easy un- 
til he has surveyed it minutely, and seen that everything 
is right to a hair's breadth. Taught by long experience, 
the servants have done their part, and all appears per- 
fect already to the casual observer. Not so to his eye. 
The hearth-rug needs a touch of the foot : the library- 
table becomes a marvel of collocation. Inkstands, pen- 
trays, letter-weighers, pamphlets, books, are marshalled 
more accurately than Frederick the Great's grenadiers. 
A chair out of its place, a corner of a crumb-cloth turned 
up, and my friend could no more get on with his task of 
composition than he could fly. I can hardly understand 
how Dr. Johnson was able to write the Rambler and to 
balance the periods of his sonorous prose while his books 
were lying upstairs dog's-eared, battered, covered with 
dust, strewed in heaps on the floor. But I do not wonder 
that Sydney Smith could go through so much and so va- 
ried work, and do it all cheerfully, when I read how he 
thought it no unworthy employment of the intellect 
which slashed respectable humbug in the Edinburgh Re- 
vieiv, to arrange that wonderful store-room' in his rectory 
at Foston, where every article of domestic consumption 
was allotted its place by the genial, clear-headed, active- 
minded man : where was the lemon-bag, where was the 
soap of different prices (the cheapest placed in the wrap- 
ings marked with the dearest price) : where were salt, 
pickles, hams, butter, cheese, onions, and medicines of 
every degree, from the ' gentle jog ' of ordinary life to 
the fearfully-named preparations reserved for extremity. 
Of course it was only because the kind reviewer's wife 
was a confirmed invalid that it became a man's duty to 
intermeddle with such womanly household cares : let 



192 CONCERNING TIDINESS. 

masculine tidiness find its sphere out of doors, and femi- 
nine within. It is curious how some men, of whom we 
should not have expected it, had a strong tendency to a 
certain orderliness. Byron, for example, led a very 
irregular life, morally speaking ; yet there was a curious 
tidiness about it too. He liked to spend certain hours of 
the forenoon daily in writing ; then, always at the same 
hour, his horses came to the door; he rode along the 
same road to the same spot ; there he daily fired his pis- 
tols, turned, and rode home again. He liked to fall into 
a kind of mill-horse round : there was an imperfectly de- 
veloped tidiness about the man. And even Johnson him- 
self, though he used to kick his books savagely about, and 
had his study floor littered with fragments of manuscript, 
showed hopeful symptom of what he might have been 
made, when he daily walked up Bolt-court, carefully 
placing his feet upon the self-same stones, in the self- 
same order. 

Great men, to be sure, may do what they please, and 
if they choose to dress like beggars and to have their 
houses as frowsy as themselves, why, we must excuse it 
for the sake of all that we owe them. But Wesley was 
philosophically right when he insisted on the necessity, 
for ordinary men, of neatness and tidiness in dress ; and 
we cannot help making a moral estimate of people from 
what we see of their conformity to the great law of 
rightness in little thinojs. I cannot tolerate a harum- 
scarum fellow who never knows where to find anything 
he wants, whose boots and handkerchiefs and gloves are 
everywhere but where they are needed. And who would 
marry a slatternly girl, whose dress is frayed at the 
edges and whose fingers are through her gloves ? The 
Latin poet wrote Nulla fronti Jides ; but I have consider- 



CONCERNING TIDINESS. 193 

able faith in a front-door. If when I go to the house of 
a man of moderate means I find the steps scrupulously 
clean, and the brass about the door shining like gold; 
and if, when the door is opened by a perfectly neat ser- 
vant (I don't suppose a footman), I find the hall trim as 
it should be, the oilcloth shiny without being slippery, 
the stair-carpet laid straight as an arrow, the brass rods 
which hold it gleaming, I cannot but think that things 
are going well in that house ; that it is the home of 
cheerfulness, hopefulness, and reasonable prosperity ; that 
the people in it speak truth and hate whiggery. Espe- 
cially I respect the mistress of that house ; and conclude 
that she is doing her duty in that station in life to which 
it has pleased God to call her. 

But if tidiness be thus important everywhere, what 
must it be in the dweUings of the poor ? In these, so 
far as my experience has gone, tidiness and morality are 
always in direct proportion. You can see at once, when 
you enter a poor man's cottage (always with your hat off, 
my friend), how his circumstances are, and generally 
how his character is. If the world is going against him; 
if hard w^ork and constant pinching will hardly get food 
and clothing for the children, you see the fact in the 
untidy house : the poor mistress of it has no heart for 
that constant effort which is needful in the cottage to 
keep things right ; she has no heart for the constant 
stitching which is needful to keep the poor little chil- 
dren's clothes on their backs. Many a time it has made 
my heart sore to see, in the relaxation of wonted tidi- 
ness, the first indication that things are going amiss, that 
hope is dying, that the poor struggling pair are feeling 
that their heads are getting under water at last. Ah, 
there is often a sad significance in the hearth no longer 
13 



194 CONCERNING TIDINESS. 

SO cleanly swept, in the handle wanting from the chest of 
drawers, in little Jamie's torn jacket, which a few stitches 
would mend, but which I remember torn for these ten 
days past ! And remember, my reader, that to keep a 
poor man's cottage tidy his wife must always have 
spirit and heart to work. If you choose, when you feel 
unstrung by some depression, to sit all day by the fire, 
the house will be kept tidy by the servants without your 
interference. And indeed the inmates of a house of the 
better sort are putting things out of order from morning 
till night, and would leave the house in a sad mess if the 
servants ^vere not constantly following in their wake and 
setting things to rights again. But if the labourer's 
wife, anxious and weak and sick at heart as she may 
rise from her poor bed, do not yet wash and dress the 
little children, they will not be either washed or dressed 
at all ; if she do not kindle her fire, there will be no fire 
at all ; if she do not prepare her husband's breakfast, he 
must go out to his hard work without any ; if she do not 
make the beds and dust the chairs and tables and wash 
the linen, and do a host of other things, they will not be 
done at all. And then in the forenoon Mrs. Bouncer, 
the retired manufacturer's wife (Mr. Bouncer has just 
bought the estate) ^ enters the cottage with an air of 
extreme condescension and patronage, and if everything 
about the cottage be not in tidy order, Mrs. Bouncer 
rebukes the poor down-hearted creature for laziness and 
neglect. T should like to choke Mrs. Bouncer for her 
heartless insolence. I think some of the hatefullest 
phases of human nature are exhibited in the visits paid 
by newly rich folk to the dwellings of the poor. You, 
Mrs. Bouncer, and people like you, have no more right to 
enter a poor man's house and insult his wife than that 



CONCERNING TmiNESS. 195 

poor man has to enter your drawing-room and give you a 
piece of his mind upon matters in general and yourself 
in particular. We hear much now-a-days about the 
distinctive characteristics of ladies and gentlemen, as 
contrasted with those of people who are well-dressed and 
live in fine houses, but whom no house and no dress will 
ever make gentlemen and ladies. It seems to me that 
the very first and finest characteristic of all who are 
justly entitled to these names of honour, is a most delicate, 
scrupulous, chivalrous consideration for the feelings of 
the poor. Without that the cottage visitor will do no 
good to the cottager. If you, my lady friend, who are 
accustomed to visit the dwellings of the poor in your 
neighbourhood, convey by your entire demeanour the 
impression that you are, socially and intellectually, com- 
ing a great way down-stairs in order to make yourself 
agreeable and intelligible to the people you find there, 
you had better have stayed at home. You will irritate, you 
will rasp, you will embitter, you will excite a disposition 
to let fly at your head. You may sometimes gratify 
your vanity and folly by meeting with a servile and 
crawling adulation, but it is a hypocritical adulation that 
grovels in your presence and shakes the fist at you after 
the door has closed on your retreating steps. Don't fancy 
I am exaggerating : I describe nothing which I have not 
myself seen and known. 

I like to think of the effect which tidiness has in 
equalizing the real content of the rich and poor. If 
even you, my reader, find it pleasant to go into the 
humblest little dwelling where perfect neatness reigns, 
think what pleasure the inmates (perhaps the solitary 
inmate) of that dwelling must have in daily maintain^ 
ing that speckless tidiness, and living in the midst of it. 



196 CONCERNING TIDINESS. 

There is to me a perfect charm about a sanded floor, 
and about deal furniture scrubbed into the perfection of 
cleanliness. How nice the table and the chairs look ; 
how inviting that solitary big arm-chair by the little 
fire ! The fireplace indeed consists of two blocks of 
stone washed over with pipeclay, and connected by half 
a dozen bars of iron ; but no register grate of polished 
steel ever pleased me better. God has made us so that 
there is a racy enjoyment, a delightful smack, about 
extreme simplicity co-existing with extreme tidiness. I 
don't mean to say that I should prefer that sanded floor 
and those chairs of deal to a Turkey carpet and carved 
oak or walnut; but I assert that there is a certain inde- 
finable relish about the simpler furniture which the 
grander wants. In a handsome apartment you don't 
think of looking at the upholstery in detail ; you remark 
whether the general effect be good or bad ; but in the 
little cottage you look with separate enjoyment on each 
separate simple contrivance. Do you think that a rich 
man, sitting in his sumptuous library, all oak and mo- 
rocco, glittering backs of splendid volumes, lounges and 
sofas of every degree, which he merely paid for, has 
half the enjoyment that Robinson Crusoe had when he 
looked round his cave with its rude shelves and bulk- 
heads, its clumsy arm-chair and its rough pottery, all 
contrived and made by his own hands ? Now the poor 
cottager has a good deal of the Robinson Crusoe enjoy- 
ment ; something of the pleasure which Sandford and 
Merton felt when they had built and thatched their 
house and then sat within it, gravely proud and happy, 
whilst the pelting shower came down but could not reach 
them. When a man gets the length of considering the 
architectural character of his house, the imposing effect 



CONCERNING TIDINESS. 197 

which the great entrance-hall will have upon visitors, 
the vista of (.Irawing-room retiring within drawing-room, 
he loses the relish which accompanies the original idea 
of a house as a something which is to keep us snug and 
warm from wind and rain and cold. So if you gain 
something by having a grand house, you lose something 
too, and something which is the more constantly and 
sensibly felt — you lose the joy of simple tidiness ; and 
your life grows so artificial, that many days you never 
think of your dwelling at all, nor remember what it 
looks like. 

I have not space to say anything of the importance 
of tidiness in the poor man's dwelling in a sanitary point 
of view. Untidiness there is the direct cause of disease 
and death. And it is the thing, too, which drives the 
husband and father to the ale-house. All this has been 
so often said, that it is needless to repeat it ; but there is 
another thing which is not so generally understood, and 
which deserves to be mentioned. Let me then say to 
all landed proprietors, it depends very much upon you 
whether the poor man's home shall be tidy or not. Give 
a poor man a decent cottage, and he has some heart to 
keep tidiness about the door, and his wife has some 
heart to maintain tidiness within. Many of the dwell- 
ings which the rich provide for the poor are such that 
the poor inmates must just sit down in despair, feeling 
that it is vain to try to be tidy, either without doors or 
within. If the cottage floor is of clay, which becomes a 
damp puddle in rainy weather ; if the roof be of very 
old thatch, full of insects, and open to the apartment 
below ; if you go down one or two steps below the 
level of the surrounding earth when you enter the 
house ; if there be no proper chimney, but merely a 



198 CONCERNING TIDINESS. 

hole in the roof, to which the smoke seems not to find its 
way till it has visited every other nook ; if swarms of 
parasitic vermin have established themselves beyond 
expulsion through fifty years of neglect and filth ; if a 
dung-heap be by ancient usage established under the 
window ; * then how can a poor overwrought man or 
woman (and energy and activity die out in the atmos- 
phere of constant anxiety and care) find spirit to try to 
tidy a place like that ? They do not know where to 
begin the hopeless task- A little encouragement will do 
wonders to develop a spirit of tidiness. The love of 
order and neatness, and the capacity of enjoying order 
and neatness, are latent in all human hearts. A man 
who has lived for a dozen years in a filthy hovel, with- 
out once making a resolute endeavour to amend it, will, 
when you put him down in a neat pretty cottage, astonish 
you by the spirit of tidiness he will exhibit, and his wife 
will astonish you as much. They feel that now there is 
some use in trying. There was none before. The 
good that is in most of us needs to be encouraged and 
fostered. In few human beings is tidiness, or any other 
virtue, so energetic that it will force its way in spite of 
extreme opposition. Anything good usually sets out 
with timid, weakly beginnings ; and it may easily be 
crushed then. And the love of tidiness is crushed in 
many a poor man and woman by the kind of dwelling in 
which they are placed by their landlords. Let us thank 
God that better times are beginning ; but times are still 

* The writer describes nothing which he has not seen a hundred 
times. He has seen a cottage, the approach to which was a narrow 
passage, about two feet in breadth, cut through a large dung-heap, 
which rose more than a yard on either side of the narrow passage, 
and which was piled up to a fathom's height against the cottage 
wall. This was not in Ireland. 



CONCERNING TIDINESS. 199 

bad enough. I don't envy the man, commoner or peer, 
whom I see in his carriage-and-four, when I think how a 
score or two famiUes of his fellow-creatures upon his 
property are living in places where he would not put his 
horses or his dogs. I am conservatively enough in- 
clined ; but I sometimes think I could join in a Chartist 
rising. 

Experience has shown that healthy, cheerful, airy 
cottages for the poor, in which something like decency 
is possible, entail no pecuniary loss upon the philan- 
thropic proprietor who builds them. But even if they 
did, it is his bounden duty to provide such dwellings. If 
he do not, he is disloyal to his country, an enemy to his 
race, a traitor to the God who entrusted him with so 
much. And surely, in the judgment of all whose opin- 
ion is worth a rush, it is a finer thing to have the cot- 
tages on a man's estate places fit for human habitation, — 
with the climbing-roses covering them, the little gravel- 
walk to the door, the little potato-plot cultivated at after- 
hours, with windows that can open and doors that can shut ; 
with little children not pallid and lean, but plump and rosy 
(and fresh air has as much to do with that as abundant 
food has), — surely, I say, it is better a thousand times to 
have one's estate dotted with scenes such as that, than to 
have a dozen more paintings on one's walls, or a score of 
additional horses in one's stables. 

And now, having said so much in praise of tidiness, 
let me conclude by remarking that it is possible to carry 
even this virtue to excess. It is foolish to keep houses 
merely to be cleaned, as some Dutch housewives are 
said to do. Nor is it fit to clip the graceful forms of 
Nature into unnatural trimness and formality, as Dutch 



200 CONCERNING TIDINESS. 

gardeners do. Among ourselves, however, I am not 
aware that there exists any tendency to either error : so 
it is needless to argue against either. The perfection of 
Dutch tidiness is to be found, I have said, at Broek, a 
few miles from Amsterdam. Here is some account of it 
from Washington Irving's ever-pleasing pen : — 

What renders Broek so perfect an Elysium in the eyes of all true 
Hollanders, is the matchless height to which the spirit of cleanliness 
is carried there. It amounts almost to a religion among the inhabi- 
tants, who pass the greater part of their time rubbing and scrubbing, 
and painting and varnishing: each housewife vies with her neigh- 
bour in devotion to the scrubbing-brush, as zealous Catholics do in 
their devotion to the Cross. 

I alighted outside the village, for no horse or vehicle is permitted 
to enter its precincts, lest it should cause defilement of the well- 
scoured pavements. Shaking the dust off my feet, then, I prepared 
to enter, with due reverence and circumspection, this sanctum sancto- 
rum of Dutch cleanliness. I entered by a narrow street, paved with 
yellow bricks, laid edgewise, and so clean that one might eat from 
them. Indeed, they were actually worn deep, not by the tread of 
feet, but by the friction of the scrubbing-brush. 

The houses were built of wood, and all appeared to have been 
freshly painted, of green, yellow, and other bright colours. They 
were separated from each other by gardens and orchards, and stood 
at some little distance from the street, with wide areas or courtyards, 
paved in mosaic with variegated stones, polished by frequent rub- 
bing. The areas were divided from the streets by curiously wrought 
railings or balusti-ades of iron, surmounted with brass and copper 
balls, scoured into dazzling effulgence. The very trunks of the trees 
in front of the houses were by the same process made to look as if 
they had been varnished. The porches, doors, and window-frames of 
the houses were of exotic woods, curiously carved, and polished like 
costly furniture. The front doors are never opened, except on chris- 
tenings, marriages, and funerals ; on all ordinary occasions, visitors 
enter by the back-doors. In former times, persons when admitted 
had to put on slippers, but this Oriental ceremony is no longer in- 
sisted on. 

We are assured by the same authority, that such is 
the love of tidiness which prevails at Broek, that the 



CONCERNING TIDINESS. 201 

good people there can imagine no greater felicity than to 
be ever surrounded by the very perfection of it. And it 
seems that the prediger, or preacher of the place, accom- 
modates his doctrine to the views of his hearers ; and 
in his weekly discourses, when he would describe that 
Happy Place where, as I trust, my readers and I will 
one day meet the quiet burghers of Broek, he strongly 
insists that it is the very tidiest place in the universe : a 
place where all things (I trust he says within as well as 
around), are spotlessly pure and clean ; and Avhere all 
disorder, confusion, and dirt are done with for ever ! 




CHAPTER VII. 
HOW I MUSED IN THE RAILWAY TRAIN : 

BEING THOUGHTS ON RISING BY CANDLELIGHT ; ON 
NERVOUS FEARS ; AND ON VAPOURING. 

|0T entirely awake, I am standing on the 
platform of a large railway terminus in a 
certain great city, at 7.20 a.m., on a foggy 
morning early in January. I am about to 
set out on a journey of a hundred miles by the 7.30 train, 
which is a slow one, stopping at all the stations. I am 
alone ; for more than human would that friendship be 
w^hich would bring out mortal man to see one off at such 
an hour in winter. It is a dreamy sort of scene ; I can 
hardly feel that it substantially exists. Who has not 
sometimes, on a still autumn afternoon, suddenly stopped 
on a path winding through sere, motionless woods, and 
felt within himself. Now, I can hardly believe in all this ? 
You talk of the difficulty of realizing the unseen and 
spiritual : is it not sometimes, in certain mental moods, 
and in certain aspects of external nature, quite as diffi- 
cult to feel the substantial existence of things which we 
can see and touch ? Extreme stillness and loneliness, 
perhaps, are the usual conditions of this peculiar feeling. 
Sometimes most men have thought to themselves that it 
would be well for them if they could but have the evi- 
dence of sense to assure them of certain great realities 



RAILWAY IMUSINGS. 203 

which while we live in this world we never can touch or 
see ; but I think that many readers will agree with me 
when I say, that very often the evidence of sense comes 
no nearer to producing the solid conviction of reality than 
does that widely different evidence on which we believe 
the existence of all that is not material. You have climbed, 
alone, on an autumn day, to the top of a great hill ; a 
river runs at its base unheard ; a champaign country 
spreads beyond the river ; cornfields swept and bare ; 
hedge-rows dusky green against the yellow ground ; a 
little farmhouse here and there, over which the smoke 
stagnates in the breezeless air. It is heather that you 
are standing on. And as you stand there alone, and look 
away over that scene, you have felt as though sense, and 
the convictions of sense, were partially paralysed : you 
have been aware that you could not feel that the land- 
scape before you was solid reality. I am not talking to 
blockheads, who never thought or felt anything particu- 
larly ; of course they could not understand my meaning. 
But as for you, thoughtful reader, have you not some- 
times, in such a scene, thought to yourself, not without a 
certain startled pleasure, — Now, I realize it no more 
substantially that there spreads a landscape beyond that 
river, than that there spreads a country beyond the 
grave ! 

There are many curious moods of mind, of which you 
will find no mention in books of metaphysics. The 
writers of works of mental philosophy keep by the bread 
and butter of the world of mind. And every one who 
knows by personal experience how great a part of the 
actual phases of thought and feeling lies beyond the 
reach of logical explanation, and can hardly be fixed and 
represented by any words, will rejoice when he meets 



204 HOW I MUSED IN 

with any account of intellectual moods which he himself 
has often known, but which are not to be classified or 
explained. And people are shy about talking of such 
things. I felt indebted to a friend, a man of high talent 
and cultivation, whom I met on the street of a large city 
on a snowy winter day. The streets were covered with 
unmelted snow ; so were the housetops ; how black and 
dirty the walls looked, contrasting with the snow. Great 
flakes were falling thickly, and making a curtain which 
at a few yards' distance shut out all objects more effect- 
ually than the thickest fog. ' It is a day,' said my friend, 
' I don't believe in ; ' and then he went away. And I 
know he would not believe in the day, and he would not 
feel that he was in a world of reality, till he had escaped 
from the eerie scene out of doors, and sat down by his 
library fire. But has not the mood found a more 
beautiful description in Coleridge's tragedy of Remorse ? 
Opium, no doubt, may have increased such phases of 
mind in his case ; but they are well known by numbers 
who never tasted opium : — 

On a rude rock, 
A rock, methought, fast by a grove of firs, 
Whose thready leaves to the low-breathiiig gale, 
Made a soft sound most like the distant ocean, 
I staid, as though the hour of death were passed, 
And I were sitting in the world of spirits — 
For all things seemed unreal. 

And there can be no doubt that the long vaulted vistas 
through a pine wood, the motionless trunks, dark and 
ghostly, and the surgy swell of the wind through the 
spines, are conditions very likely to bring on, if you are 
alone, this particular mental state. 

But to return to the railway station which suggested 



THE RAILWAY TRAIN. 205 

all this ; it is a dreamy scene, and I look at it with sleepy 
eyes. JThere are not many people going by the train, 
though it is a long one. Daylight is an hour or more 
distant yet ; and the directors, either with the design of 
producing picturesque lights and shadows in their shed, 
or with tlie design of economizing gas, have resorted to 
the expedient of lighting only every second lamp. 
There are no lamps, too, in the carriages ; and the blank 
abysses seen through the open doors remind one of the 
cells in some feudal dungeon. A little child would as- 
suredly howl if it were brought to this place this morn- 
ing. Away in the gloom, at the end of the train, the 
sombre engine that is to take us is hissing furiously, and 
throwing a lurid glare upon the ground underneath it. 
Nobody's wits have fully arrived. The clerk who gave 
me my ticket was yawning tremendously ; the porters on 
the platform are yawning ; the guard, who is standing 
two yards off, looking very neat and trimly dressed 
through the gloom, is yawning ; the stoker who was 
shovelling coke into the engine fire was yawning awfully 
as he did so. We are away through the fog, through 
the mist, over the black country which is slowly turning 
gray in the morning twilight. I have with me various 
newspapers ; but for an hour and more it will be impos- 
sible to see to read them. Two fellow-travellers, whose 
forms I dimly trace, I hear expressing indignation that 
the railway company give no lamps in the carriages. I 
lean back and try to think. 

It is most depressing and miserable work, getting up 
by candlelight. It is impossible to shave comfortably ; 
it is impossible to have a satisfactory bath ; it is impos- 
sible to find anything you want. Sleep, says Sancho 
Panza, covers a man all over like a mantle of comfort ; 



206 HOW I MUSED IN 

but rising before daylight envelopes the entire being in 
petty misery. An indescribable vacuity makes itself felt 
in the epigastric regions, and a leaden heaviness weighs 
upon heart and spirits. It must be a considerable item 
in the hard lot of domestic servants, to have to get up 
through all the winter months in the cold dark house : 
let us be thankful to them through whose humble labours 
and self-denial we find the cheerful fire blazing in the 
tidy breakfast parlour when we find our way down-stairs. 
That same apartment looked cheerless enough when the 
housemaid entered it two hours ago. It is sad when you 
are lying in bed of a morning, lazily conscious of that 
circling amplitude of comfort, to hear the chilly cry of 
the poor sweep outside ; or the tread of the factory hands 
shivering by in their thin garments towards the great 
cotton mill, glaring spectral out of its many windows, 
but at least with a cosy suggestion of warmth and 
light. Think of the baker, too, who rose in the dark of 
midnight that those hot rolls might appear on your break- 
fast table ; and of the printer, intelligent, active, accurate 
to a degree that you careless folk who put no points ill 
your letters have little idea of, whose labours have given 
you that damp sheet which in a little will feel so crisp 
and firm after it has been duly dried, and which will tell 
you all that is going on over all the world, down to the 
opera which closed at twelve, and the Parliamentary de- 
bate which was not over till half-past four. It is good 
occasionally to rise at five on a December morning, that 
you may feel how much you are indebted to some who 
do so for your sake all the winter through. No doubt 
they get accustomed to it : but so may you by doing it 
always. A great many people, living easy lives, have 
no idea of the discomfort of rising by candlelight. Prob- 



THE RAILWAY TRAIN. 207 

ably they hardly ever did it: when they did it, they 
had a blazing fire and abundant light to dress by ; and 
even with these advantages, which essentially change 
the nature of the enterprise, they have not done it for 
very long. What an aggregate of misery is the result of 
that inveterate usage in the University of Glasgow, that 
the early lectures begin at 7.30 a.m. from November till 
May ! How utterly miserable the dark, dirty streets 
look, as the unhappy student splashes through mud and 
smoke to the black archway that admits to those groves 
of Academe ! And what a blear-eyed, unwashed, un- 
shaven, Winking, ill-natured, wretched set it is that tills 
the benches of the lecture-room ! The design of the au- 
thorities in maintaining that early hour has been much 
misunderstood. Philosophers have taught that the pro- 
fessors, in bringing out their unhappy students at that 
period, had it in view to turn to use an hour of the day 
which otherwise would have been wasted in bed, and 
thus set free an hour at a better season of the day. An- 
other school of metaphysicians, among whom may be 
reckoned the eminent authors, Brown, Jones, and Robin- 
son, have maintained with considerable force of argument 
that the authorities of the University, eager to advance 
those under their charge in health, wealth, and wisdom, 
have resorted to an observance which has for many ages 
been regarded as conducive to that end. Others, again, 
the most eminent among whom is Smith, have taken up 
the ground that the professors have fixed on the early 
hour for no reason in particular ; but that, as the classes 
must meet at some hour of each day, they might just as 
well meet at that hour as at any other. All these theo- 
ries are erroneous. There is more in the system than 
meets the eye. It originated in Roman Catholic days ; 



208 HOW I MUSED IN 

and something of the philosophy of the stoic and of the 
faith of the anchorite is involved in it. Grim lessons 
of endurance ; dark hints of penance ; extensive disgust 
at matters in general, and a disposition to punch the 
head of humanity ; are mystically connected with the lec- 
tures at 7.30 A.M. in winter. It is quite different in sum- 
mer, when everything is bright and inviting ; if you are 
up and forth by five or six o'clock any morning then, you 
feel ashamed as you look at the drawn blinds and the 
closed shutters of the house in the broad daylight. There 
is something curious in the contrast between the stillness 
and shut-up look of a country-house in the early summer 
morning, and the blaze of light, the dew sparkling life- 
like on the grass, the birds singing, and all nature plainly 
awake though man is asleep. You feel that at 7.30 in 
June, Nature intends you to be astir ; but believe it, ye 
learned doctors of Glasgow College, at 7.30 in Decem- 
ber, her intention is quite the reverse. And if you fly in 
Nature's face, and persist in getting up at unseasonable 
hours, she will take it out of you by making you horribly 
uncomfortable. 

There is, indeed, one fashion in which rising by candle- 
light, under the most uncomfortable circumstances, may 
turn to a source of positive enjoyment. And the more 
dreary and wretched you feel, as you wearily drag your- 
self out of bed into the searching cold, the greater will 
that peculiar enjoyment be. Have you not, my reader, 
learned by your own experience that the machinery of 
the human mind and heart may be ivorked backwards, 
just as a steam-engine is reversed, so that a result may 
be produced which is exactly the opposite of the normal 
one ? The fundamental principle on which the working 
of the human constitution, as regards pleasure and pain, 



THE RAILWAY TRAIN. 209 

goes, may be stated in the following formula, which will 
not appear a truism except to those who have not brains 
to understand it — 

The more jolly you are, the jollier you are. 

But by reversing the poles, or by working the machine 
backwards, many human beings, such as Indian fakirs, 
mediaeval monks and hermits, Simeon Stylites, very early 
risers, very hard students, Childe Harold, men who fall 
in love and then go off to Australia without telling the 
young woman, and the like, bring themselves to this : — 
that their fundamental principle, as regards pleasure and 
pain, takes the following form — 

The more miserable you are, the jollier you 
are. 

Don't you know that all that is true ? A man may 
bring himself to this point, that it shall be to him a posi- 
tive satisfaction to think how much he is denying him- 
self, and how much he is taking out of himself. And all 
this satisfaction may be felt quite irrespective of any 
worthy end to be attained by all this pain, toil, endurance, 
self-denial. I believe indeed that the taste for suffering 
as a source of enjoyment is an acquired taste ; it takes 
some time to bring any human being to it. It is not nat- 
ural, in the obvious meaning of the word ; but assuredly 
it is natural in the sense that it founds on something 
which is of the essence of human nature. You must 
penetrate through the upper stratum of the heart, so to 
speak — that stratum which finds enjoyment in enjoy- 
ment — and then you reach to a deeper sensorium, one 
whose sensibility is as keen, one whose sensibility is 
longer in getting dulled — that sensorium which finds en- 
joyment in endurance. Nor have many years to pass over 
us before we come to feel that this peculiar sensibiHty 

14 



210 HOW I MUSED m 

has been in some measure developed. If you, my friend, 
are now a man, it is probable (alas ! not certain) that 
you were once a boy. Perhaps you were a clever boy ; 
perhaps you were at the head of your class ; perhaps you 
were a hardworking boy. And now tell me, when on a 
fine summer evening you heard the shouts and merriment 
of your companions in the playground, while you were 
toiling away with your lexicon and your Livy, or turning 
a passage from Shakspeare into Greek iambics (a hardly- 
acquired accomplishment, which has proved so useful in 
after life), did you not feel a certain satisfaction — it was 
rather a sad one, but still a satisfaction — as you thought 
how pleasant it would be to be out in the beautiful sunshine, 
and yet felt resolved that out you would not go ! Well 
for you if your father and mother set themselves stoutly 
against this dangerous feeling ; well for you if you never 
overheard them relating with pride to their acquaintances 
what a laborious, self-denying, wonderful boy thou wast ! 
For the sad satisfaction which has been described is the 
self-same feeling which makes the poor Hindoo swing 
himself on a large hook stuck through his skin, and the 
fakir pleased when he finds that his arm, stretched out 
for twenty years, cannot now be drawn back. It is pre- 
cisely the feeling which led the saints of the middle ages 
to starve themselves till their palate grew insensible to the 
taste of food, or to flagellate themselves as badly as Le- 
gree did Uncle Tom, or to refrain wholly from the use of 
soap and water for forty years. It is a most dangerous 
thing to indulge in, this enjoyment arising from the prin- 
ciple of the greatest jollity from the greatest suffering ; for 
althouojh we ou<2;ht to feel thankful that God has so or- 
dered things, that in a world where little that is good can 
be done except by painful exertion and resolute self-de- 



THE RAILWAY TRAIN. 211 

nial, a certain satisfaction is linked even with that exer- 
tion and self-denial in themselves, apart from the good 
results to which they lead ; it seems to me that we have 
no right to add needless bitterness to life that our morbid 
spirit may draw from it a morbid enjoyment. No doubt 
self-denial, and struggle against our nature for the right, 
is a noble thing : but I think that in the present day 
there is a tendency unduly to exalt both work and self- 
denial, as though these things were excellent in them- 
selves apart from any excellent ends which follow from 
them. Work merely as work is not a good thing : it is a 
good thing because of the excellent things that come with 
it and of it. And so with self-denial, whether it appear 
in swinging on a hook or in rising at five on a winter 
morning. It is a noble thing if it is to do some good ; 
but very many people appear to think it a noble thing in 
itself, though it do no good whatever. The man de- 
serves canonization who swings on a hook to save his 
country ; but the man is affected with a morbid reversal 
of the constitution of human nature v>ho swings on a 
hook because he finds a strange satisfaction in doing some- 
thing which is terribly painful and abhorrent. The true 
nobility of labour and self-denial is reflected back on them 
from a noble end : there is nothing fine in accumulating 
suffering upon ourselves merely because we hate it, but 
feel a certain secondary pleasure in resolutely submitting 
to what primarily we hate. There is nothing fine in go- 
ing into a monastery merely because you would much 
rather stay out. There is nothing fine in going off to 
America, and never asking a woman to be your wife, 
merely because you are very fond of her, and know that 
all this will be a fearful trial to go through. You will be 
in truth ridiculous, though you may fancy yourself sub- 



212 HOW I MUSED IN 

lime, when you are sitting at the door of your log- 
hut away in backwoods lonely as those loved by Daniel 
Boone, and sadly priding yourself on the terrible sacrifice 
you have made. That sacrifice would have been grand 
if it had been your solemn duty to make it ; it is silly, 
and it is selfish, if it be made for mere self-denial's sake. 
Now a great many people do not remember this. 
David Copperfield was pleased in thinking that he was 
taking so much out of himself. He was pleased in think- 
ing so, even though no earthly good came of his doing 
all that. His kind aunt was ruined, and he was deter- 
mined that he would deny himself in every way that he 
might not be a burden upon her ; and so when he was 
walking to any place he walked at a furious pace, and 
was glad to find himself growing fagged and out of breath, 
because surely it must be a good thing to feel so jaded 
and miserable. It was self-sacrifice ; it was self-denial. 
And if to walk at five miles and a half an hour had had 
any tendency to restore his aunt's little fortune, it could 
not have been praised too much ; and the less David 
liked it, the more praise it would have deserved. And I 
venture to think that a good deal of the present talk 
about muscular Christianity is based upon this error. I 
do not know that exertion of the muscles, as such, is 
necessarily a good or an essentially Christian thing. It 
is good because it promotes health of body and of mind ; 
but you find many books which appear to teach that it is 
a fine thing in itself to leap a horse over a five-barred 
gate, or to crumple up a silver jug, or to thrash a prize- 
fighter. It is very well to thrash the prize-fighter if it 
becomes necessary, but surely it would be better to es- 
cape the necessity of thrashing the prize-fighter. Certain 
of the poems of Longfellow, much admired and quoted 



THE KAIL WAY TRAIN. 213 

by young ladies, are instinet with the mischievous notion 
that self-denial lor mere self-denial's sake is a grand, he- 
roic, and i-eligious thing. The Psalm of Life is ex- 
tremely vague, and somewhat unintelligible. It is philo- 
sophically false to say that 

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, 
Is oar destined end or way. 

For, rightly understood, happiness not only is our aim, 
but is plainly intended to be such by our Creator. He 
made us to be happy : the whole bearing of revealed 
religion is to make us happy. Of course, the man who 
grasps at selfish enjoyment turns his back on happiness. 
Self-sacrifice and exertion, where needful, are the way to 
happiness ; and the main thing which we know of the 
Christian Heaven is, that it is a state of happiness. But 
Longfellow, talking in that fashion (no doubt sitting in a 
large easy chair by a warm fire in a snug study when he 
did so), wants to convey the utterly false notion, that 
there is something fine in doing what is disagreeable, 
merely for the sake of doing it. Now, that notion is 
Bhuddism, but it is not Christianity. Christianity says 
to us. Suffer, labour, endure up to martyrdom, when duty 
calls you ; but never fancy that there is anything noble 
in throwing yourself in martyrdom's way. ' Thou shalt 
not tempt the Lord thy God.' And as for Longfellow's 
conception of the fellow who went up the Alps, bellowing 
out Excelsior, it is nothing better than childish. Any 
one whose mind is matured enough to discern that Cliilde 
Harold was a humbug, will see that the lad was a fool. 
What on earth was he to do when he got to the top of 
the Alps ? The poet does not even pretend to answer 
that question. He never pretends that the lad whose 



214 HOW I MUSED IN 

brow was sad, and his eye like a faulchion, &c., had any- 
thing useful or excellent to accomplish when he reached 
the mountain-top at last. Longfellow wishes us to un- 
derstand that it was a noble thing to push onward and 
upward through the snow, merely because it is a very 
difficult and dangerous thing. He wishes us to under- 
stand that it was a noble thing to turn away from warm 
household fires to spectral glaciers, and to resist the invi- 
tations of the maiden, who, if the lad was a stranger in 
those parts, as seems to be implied, must have been a 
remarkably free and easy style of young lady — merely 
because average human nature would have liked ex- 
tremely to get out of the storm to the bright fireside, and 
to have had a quiet chat with the maiden. I don't mean 
to say that about ten years ago I did not think that 
Excelsior was a wonderful poem, setting out a true and 
noble principle. A young person is captivated with the 
notion of self-sacrifice, with or without a reason for it ; 
but self-sacrifice, uncalled for and useless, is stark folly. 
It was very good of Curtius to jump into the large hole 
in the Forum ; no doubt he saved the Senate great ex- 
pense in filling it up, though probably it would have been 
easier to do so than to carry the Liverpool and Manches- 
ter Railway through Chatmoss. And we cannot think, 
even yet, of Leonidas and his three hundred at Ther- 
mopylae, without some stir of heart ; but would not the 
gallant Lacedaemonians have been silly and not heroic, 
had not their self-sacrifice served a great end, by gaining 
for their countrymen certain precious days ? Even Dick- 
ens, though not much of a philosopher, is more philo- 
sophic than Longfellow. He wrote a little book one 
Christmas time, The Battle of Life, whose plot turns en- 
tirely upon an extraordinary act of self-sacrifice ; and 



THE RAILWAY TRAIN. 215 

which contains raany sentences which sound like the cant 
of the day. Witness the following : — 

It is a world on which the sun never rises, but it looks upon a 
thousand bloodless battles, that are some set-olT against the miseries 
and wickedness of battle-fields. 

There are victories gained every day, in sti'uggling hearts, to which 
these fields of battle are as nothing. 

But although the book contains such sentences, which 
seem to teach that struggle and self-conquest are noble 
in themselves, apart from their aim or their necessity, 
the lesson taught by the entire story is the true and just 
one, that there is no nobler thing than self-sacrifice and 
self-conquest, when they are right, when they are needful, 
when a noble end is to be gained by them. As some 
dramatist or other says — 

That's truly great! What think ye, 'twas set up 
The Greek and Roman names in such a lustre, 
But doing right, in stern despite of nature! 
Shutting their ears 'gainst all her little cries, 
When great, august, and godlike virtue called 1 

The author, you see, very justly remarks that you are 
not called to fly in the face of danger, unless when there 
is good reason for it. And therefore, my friend, don't 
get up at seven o'clock on a winter morning, if you can 
possibly help it. If virtue calls, it will indeed be noble 
to rise by candlelight; but not otherwise. If you are the 
engine-driver of an early train, if you are a factory-hand, 
if you are a Glasgow student of philosophy, get up at an 
miseasonable period, and accept the writer's sym[)athy 
and admiration. Poor fellow, you cannot help it ! But 
if you are a Glasgow professor, I have no veneration for 
that needless act of self-denial. Ton need not get up so 
early unless you like. You do the thing of your free 



216 HOW I MUSED IN 

choice. And your heroism is only that of the Brahmin 
who swings on the hook, when nobody asks him to do so. 

Having mused in this fashion, I look out of the car- 
riage window. The morning is breaking, cold and dis- 
mal. There is a thick white mist. We are flying on, 
across gray fields, by spectral houses and trees, showing 
indistinct through the uncertain light. It is light enough 
to read, by making an effort. I draw from my pocket a 
letter, which came late last night : it is from a friend, who 
is an eminent Editor. I do not choose to remember the 
name of the periodical which he conducts. I have had 
time to do no more than glance over it ; and I have not 
yet arrived at its full meaning. I feel as Tony Lumpkin 
felt, who never had the least difficulty in reading the out- 
side of his letters, but who found it very hard work to de- 
cipher the inside. The circumstance was the more annoy- 
ing, he justly observed, inasmuch as the inside of a letter 
generally contains the cream of the correspondence. 

AVhen I receive a letter from my friend the Editor, I 
am able, by an intense application of attention for a few 
minutes, to make out its general drift and meaning. The 
difficulty in the way of grasping the entire sense does 
not arise from any obscurity of style, but wholly from the 
remarkable nature of the penmanship. And after gain- 
ing the general bearing of the document, I am well aware 
that there are many recesses and nooks of meaning which 
will not be reached but after repeated perusals. What 
appeared at first a flourish of the pen may gradually 
assume the form of an important clause of a sentence, 
materially modifying its force. What appears at present 
a blot may turn out to be anything whatever ; what at 
present looks like No may prove to have stood for Yes. 



THE RAILWAY TRAIN. 217 

I think sympathetically of the worthy fjither of Dr. 
Chalmers. When he received his weekly or fortnightly 
letter from his distinguished son, he carefully locked it 
up. By the time a little store had accumulated, his son 
came to pay him a visit ; and then he broke all the seals, 
and got the writer of the letters to read them. I read 
my letter over ; several shades of thought break upon me, 
of whose existence in it I was previously unaware. That 
handwriting is like In Memoriam. Read it for the twen- 
tieth time, and you will find something new in it. I fold 
the letter up ; and I begin to think of a matter concern- 
ing which I have thought a good deal of late. 

Surely, I think to myself, there is a respect in which the 
more refined and cultivated portion of the human race in 
Britain is suffering a rapid deterioration, and getting into 
a morbid state. I mean in the matter of nervous irritabil- 
ity or excitability. Surely people are far more nervous 
now than they used to be some generations back. The 
mental cultivation and the mental wear which we have to 
go through, tends to make that strange and inexplicable 
portion of our physical constitution a very great deal too 
sensitive for the work and trial of daily life. A few days 
ago I drove a friend who had been paying us a visit 
over to our railway-station. He is a man of fifty, a 
remarkably able and accomplished man. Before the 
train started the guard came round to look at the tickets. 
My friend could not find his ; he searched his pockets 
everywhere, and although the entire evil consequence, 
had the ticket not turned up, could not possibly have 
been more than the payment a second time of tour or 
five shillings, he got into a nervous tremor painful to see. 
He shook from head to foot ; his hand trembled so that 
he could not prosecute his search rightly, and finally he 



218 HOW I MUSED IN 

found the missing ticket in a pocket which he had ah'eady 
searched half a dozen times. Now contrast the condition 
of this highly-civilized man, thrown into a painful flurry 
and confusion at the demand of a railway ticket, with the 
impassive coolness of a savage, who would not move a 
muscle if you hacked him in pieces. Is it not a dear 
price we pay for our superior cultivation, this morbid 
sensitiveness which makes us so keenly alive to influ- 
ences which are painful and distressing? I have known 
very highly educated people who were positively trem- 
bling with anxiety and undefined fear every day before 
the post came in. Yet they had no reason to anticipate 
bad news ; they could conjure up indeed a hundred 
gloomy forebodings of evil, but no one knew better than 
themselves how vain and weak were their fears. Surely 
the knights of old must have been quite different. They 
had great stalwart bodies, and no minds to speak of. 
They had no doubt a high sense of honour — not a very 
enlightened sense — but their purely intellectual nature 
was hardly developed at all. They never read anything. 
There were not many knights or squires like Fitz Eu- 
stace, who 

Much bad pored 
Upon a huge romantic tome, 
In the hall window of his home, 
Imprinted at the antique dome 
Of Caxton or De Worde. 

They never speculated upon any abstract subject : and 
although in their long rides from place to place they 
might have had time for thinking, I suppose their atten- 
tion was engrossed by the necessity of having a sharp 
look-out around them for the appearance of a foe. And 
we all know that tJiat kind of sharpness — the hunter's 



THE RAILWAY TRAIN. 219 

sharpness, the guerilla's sliar[)nes8 — may coexist with 
the densest stupidity in all matters beyond the little range 
that is familiar. The aboriginal Australian can trace 
friend or foe with the keenness almost of brute instinct : 
so can the Red Indian, so can the Wild Bushman ; yet 
the intellectual and moral nature in all these races is not 
very many degrees above the elephant or the shepherd^s 
dog. And stupidity is a great preservative against ner- 
vous excitability or anxiety. A dull man cannot think 
of the thousand sad possibilities which the quicker mind 
sees are brooding over human life. Nor does this friendly 
stupidity only dull the understanding ; it gives inertia, 
immobility, to the emotional nature. Compare a pure 
thoroughbred horse with a huge heavy cart-horse with- 
out a trace of breeding. The thoroughbred is a beautiful 
creature indeed : but look at the startled eye, look at the 
quick ears, look at the blood coursing through those great 
veins so close to the surface, look how tremblingly alive 
the creature is to any sudden sight or sound. Why, 
there you have got the i)erfection of equine nature, 
but you have paid for it just the same price that you 
pay for the perfection of human nature — what a nervous 
creature you have there ! Then look at the cart-horse. 
It is clumsy in shape, ungraceful in movement, rough in 
skin, dull of eye ; in short, it is a great ugly brute. But 
what a placid equanimity there is about it ! How com- 
posed, how immovable it looks, standing with its head 
hanging down, and its eyes half-closed. It is a low type 
of its race no doubt, but it enjoys the blessing which is 
enjoyed by the dull, stupid, unrefined woman or man ; it 
is not nervous. Let something fall with a whack, it does 
not start as if it had been shot. Throw a little pebble at 
its flank, it turns round tranquilly to see what is the 



220 HOW I MUSED IN 

matter. Why, the thoroughbred would have been over 
that hedge at much less provocation. 

The morbid nervousness of the present day appears in 
several ways. It brings a man sometimes to that star- 
tled state that the sudden opening of a door, the clash of 
the falling fire-irons, or any little accident, puts him in a 
flutter. How nervous the late Sir Robert Peel must 
have been when, a few weeks before his death, he went 
to the Zoological Gardens, and when a monkey suddenly 
sprang upon his arm, the great and worthy man fainted ! 
Another phase of nervousness is when a man is brought 
to that state that the least noise, or cross-occurrence, 
seems to jar through the entire nervous system — to 
upset him, as we say ; when he cannot command his 
mental powers except in perfect stillness, or in the cham- 
ber and at the writing-table to which he is accustomed ; 
when, in short, he gets fidgety, easily worried, full 
of whims and fancies which must be mdulged and 
considered, or he is quite out of sorts. Another phase 
of the same morbid condition is, when a human being is 
always oppressed with vague undefined fears that things 
are going wrong ; that his income will not meet the 
demands upon it, that his child's lungs are affected, that 
his mental powers are leaving him — a state of feeling 
which shades rapidly off into positive insanity. Indeed, 
when matters remain long in any of the fashions which 
have been described, I suppose the natural termination 
must be disease of the heart, or a shock of paralysis, or 
insanity in the form .either of mania or idiocy. Numbers 
of commonplace people who could feel very acutely, but 
who could not tell what they felt, have been worried into 
fatal heart-disease by prolonged anxiety and misery. 
Every one knows how paralysis laid its hand upon Sir 



THE RAILWAY TRAIN. 221 

Walter Scott, always great, lastly heroic. Protract- 
ed anxiety how to make the ends meet, with a large 
family and an uncertain income, drove Southey's first 
wife into the lunatic asylum : and there is hardly a more 
touching story than that of her fears and forebodings 
through nervous year after year. Not less sad was the 
end of her overwrought husband, in blank vacuity ; nor 
the like end of Thomas Moore. And perhaps the sad- 
dest instance of the result of an overdriven nervous 
system, in recent days, was the end of that rugged, 
honest, wonderful genius, Hugh Miller. 

Is it a reaction, a desperate rally against something 
that is felt to be a powerful invader, that makes it so 
much a point of honour with Englishmen at this day to 
retain, or appear to retain, a perfect immobility under all 
circumstances? It is pretty and interesting for a lady, 
at all events for a young lady, to exhibit her nervous 
tremors ; a man sternly represses the exhibition of these. 
Stoic philosophy centuries since, and modern refinement 
in its last polish of manner, alike recognise the Eed 
Indian's principle, that there is something manly, some- 
thing fine, in the repression of human feeling. Here is 
a respect in which the extreme of civilization and the 
extreme of barbarism closely approach one another. 
The Red Indian really did not care for anything ; the 
modern fine gentleman, the youthful exquisite, though 
really pretty nervous, wishes to convey by his entire 
deportment the impression, that he does not care for any- 
thing. A man is to exhibit no strong emotion. It is 
unmanly. If he is glad, he must not look it. If he 
loses a great deal more money than he can afford on the 
Derby, he must take it coolly. Everything is to be 
taken coolly : and some indurated folk no doubt are truly 
as cool as they look. Let me have nothing to do with 



222 HOW I MUSED IN 

such. Nil admirari is not a good maxim for a man. 
The coolest individual who occurs to me at this moment 
is Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust. He was not a 
pleasant character. That coolness is not human. It is 
essentially Satanic. But in many people in modern days 
the apparent coolness covers a most painful nervousness. 
Indeed, as a general rule, whenever any one does any- 
thing which is (socially speaking,) outrageously daring, 
it is because he is nervous ; and struggling with the feel- 
ing, and striving to conceal the fact. A speaker who is 
too forward, who is jauntily free and easy, is certainly 
very nervous. And though I have said that perfect 
coolness in all circumstances is not amiable or desirable, 
still one cannot look but with interest, if not with sym- 
pathy, at Campbell's fine description of the Red Indian : 

He said, — and strained unto his heart the boy: 
Far diflferently, the mute Oneyda took 
His calumet of peace and cup of joy : 
As monumental bronze unchanged his look; 
A soul that pity touched, but never shook ; 
Trained from his tree-rocked cradle to his bier 
The fierce extremes of good and ill to brook 
Impassive, — fearing but the shame of fear, — 
A Stoic of the woods, — a man without a tear! 

The writings of Mr. Dickens furnish me with a com- 
panion picture adapted to modern times. I confess that, 
upon reflection, I doubt whether a considerable portion of 
the interest of Outalissi's peculiar manner may not be 
derived from distance in time and space. Indian immo- 
bility and stoical philosophy are not sublime in the ser- 
vants' hall of modern society : — 

* I don't know anything,' said Britain, with a leaden eye and an 
immovable visage. ' I don't care for anything. I don't make out 
anything. I don't believe anything. And I don't want anything.' * 

* Tlie Battle of Life; Oiristmas Books, p. 169. 



THE RAH. WAY TRAIN. 223 

Nervous people should live in large towns. The 
houses are so big and afford such impervious shadow, 
that the nervous man, very little when compared with 
them, does not feel himself pushed into painful promi- 
nence. It is a comfort, too, to see many other people 
going about. It carries the nervous man out of himself. 
It reminds him that multitudes more have their cares as 
well as he. It dispels the uncomfortable feeling which 
grows on such people in the country, that everybody is 
thinking and talking of them, — to see numbers of men 
and women, all quite occupied with their own concerns, 
and evidently never thinking of them at all. 

I have known one of these shrinking and evil-forebod- 
ing persons say, that he could not have lived in the coun- 
try (as he did), had not the district where his home w^as 
been very thickly wooded with large trees. It was a 
comfort to a man who wished to shrink out of sight and 
get quietly by, when the road along which he was walking 
wound into a thick wood. The trees were so big and so 
old, and they seemed to make a shelter from the outer 
world. In walking over a vast bare level down, a man 
is the most conspicuous figure in the landscape. There 
is nothing taller than himself, and he can be seen from 
miles away. Now, to be pushed into notice — to be made 
a conspicuous figure — is intensely painful to the nervous 
man. You and I, my reader, no doubt think such a state 
of feeling morbid, but it is probably a state to which cir- 
cumstances might bring most people. And we can quite 
well understand that when pressed by care, sorrow, or 
fear, there is something friendly in the shade of trees — in 
anything that dims the light, and hides from public view. 
You remember the poor fellow (a very silly fellow indeed, 
but very silly fellows can sufler), who asked Little Dorrit to 



224 HOW I MUSED IN 

marry him, and met a decided though a kind refusal. 
He lived somewhere over in Southwark, in a street of 
poor houses, which had little back-greens, but of course 
no trees in them. But the poor fellow felt the instinctive 
longing of the stricken heart for shadow ; and so, when 
his mother hung out the clothes from the wash on ropes 
crossing and re-crossing the little green, he used to go 
out and sit amid the flapping sheets, and say that ' he felt 
it like groves /' Was not that a testimony to the friendly 
congeniality of trees to the sad or timorous human being ? 
And when Cowper wearied to get away from a turbu- 
lent world to some quiet retreat, he did not wish that 
that retreat should be in an open country. No, he 
says — 

Oh, for a lodge in some vast wilderness, 
Some boundless continuity of shade, 
Where rumour of oppression and deceit, 
Of unsuccessful or successful war, 
Might never reach me more ! 

To the same effect did the same shrinking poet ex- 
press himself in lines equally familiar : — 

I was a stricken deer that left the hei'd 
Long since: with many an arrow deep infixed 
My panting side was charged, when I withdrew 
To seek a tranquil death in distant shades. 

I suppose that if some heavy blow had fallen upon any 
of us, we should not choose the open field or the bare 
hillside as the place to which we should go to think 
about it. We should rather choose some low-lying, shel- 
tered, shaded spot. Great sorrow does not parade itself. 
It wishes to get out of sight. 

As to the question how this nervousness may be got 
rid of, it is difficult to know \vhat to think. It is in great 



THE RAILWAY TRAIN. 225 

measure a physical condition, and not under the control 
of the will. Some people would treat it physically — 
send the nervous man to the water cure, — put him in 
training like a prize-fighter or a pedestrian, and the like. 
These are excellent things ; still I have greater confi- 
dence in mental remedies. Give the evil-forebodino^ man 
plenty to do ; push him out of his quiet course of life into 
the turmoil which he shrinks away from, and the turmoil 
will lose its fears. Work is the healthy atmosphere for 
a human being. The soul of man is a machine with this 
great peculiarity about it, — that we cannot stop it from 
motion when we will. Perhaps that is a defect. Many 
a man, through a weary sleepless night, has longed for 
the power to push some lever or catch into the swift- 
running engine that was whirring away within him, and 
bring it to a stand. However, it cannot be. And as the 
machine ttnll go on, we must provide it with grist to 
grind, we must give it work to do, or it will knock itself 
in pieces ; or if not tliat, then get all warped and twisted, 
so that it never shall go without creaking, and straining, 
and trembling. And so, if you find a man or woman, 
young or old, vexed with ceaseless fears, worried with 
all kinds of odd ideas, doubts upon religious matters and 
the like, don't argue with them ; that is not the treatment 
that is necessary in the meantime. There is something 
else to be done first. It would do no good to blister a 
horse's legs till the previous inflammation has gone down. 
It will do no good to present the soundest views to a ner- 
vous, idle man. Set him to hard work. Give him lots 
to do. And then that invisible machine, which has been 
turning off misery and delusion, will begin to turn off 
content and sound views of all things. After two or 
three weeks of this healthful treatment you may proceed 

16 



226 HOW I MUSED IN 

to argue with your friend. In all likelihood you will find 
that argument will not be necessary. He has arrived at 
truth and sense already. There is a wonderfully close 
connexion between work and sound views ; between do- 
ing and knowing. It is in life as it is in religion : ' If any 
man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine 
whether it be of God.' 

Looking out now, I see it has grown quite light, though 
the day is gloomy, and will be so to its close. The train 
is speeding round the base of a great hill. Far below us 
a narrow little river is dashing on, all in foam. Its sound 
is faintly heard at this height. I said to myself, by way 
of winding up ray musing upon nervousness : After all, 
is not this painful fact just an over-degree of that which 
makes us living beings ? Is it not just life too sensi- 
tively present in every atom of even the dull flesh ? 
There is that gray rock which we are passing ; how still 
and immovable it is ! All the stoicism of Greece, all the 
impassiveness of the mute Oneyda, all the indifference of 
the pococurante Englishman, how far they fall short of 
that sublime stillness ! But it is still because it is sense- 
less. It looks as if it felt nothing, because it really feels 
nothing. I compare it with Lord Derby before he gets 
-up to make a great speech ; fidgeting on his seat ; watch- 
ing every movement and word of the man he is going to 
smash ; his wonderfully ready mind working with a whirr 
like wheel-work revolving unseen through its speed ; liv- 
ing intensely, in fact, in every fibre of his frame. Well, 
that is the finer thing, after all. The big cart-horse, 
already thought of, is something midway between the 
Premier and the granite. The stupid blockhead is cooler 
than the Premier, indeed ; but he is not so cool as the 
granite. If coolness be so fine a thing, of course the per- 



THE RAILWAY TRAIN. 227 

fection of coolness must be tlie finest thing ; and that we 
find in the lifeless rock. What is life but that which 
makes us more sensitive than the rock : what is tlie high- 
est type of life but that which makes us most sensitive ? 
It is better to be the warm, trembling, foreboding human 
being, than to be Ben Nevis, knowing nothing, feeling 
nothing, fearing nothing, cold and lifeless. 

It is natural enough to pass from thinking of one 
human weakness to thinking of another ; and certain 
remarks of a fellow-traveller, not addressed to me, sug- 
gest the inveterate tendency to vapouring and big talking 
which dwells in many men and women. Who is there 
who desires to appear to his fellow-creatures pi-ecisely 
what he is ? I have known such people and admired 
them, for they are comparatively few. Why does Mr. 
Smith, when some hundreds of miles from home, talk of 
his place in the country ? In the etymological sense of 
the words it certainly is a place in the country, for it is a 
seedy one-storied cottage without a tree near it, standing 
bleakly on a hillside. But a place in the country sug- 
gests to the mind long avenues, great shrubberies, exten- 
sive greenhouses, fine conservatories, lots of horses, abun- 
dance of servants ; and that is the picture which Mr. 
Smith desires to call up before the mind's eye of those 
whom he addresses. When Mr. Robinson talks with 
dignity about the political discussions which take place 
in his Sei'vants' Hall, the impression conveyed is that 
Robinson has a vast establishment of domestics. A 
vision rises of ancient retainers, of a dignified house- 
keeper, of a bishop-like butler, of Jeamses without num- 
ber, of unstinted October. A man of strong imagination 
may even think of huntsmen, falconers, couriers — of a 



228 HOW I MUSED IX 

grand baronial menage^ in fact. You would not think 
that Robinson's estabhshment consists of a cook, a house- 
maid, and a stable-boy. Very well for the fellow too ; 
but why will he vapour ? When Mr. Jones told me the 
other day that something or other happened to him when 
he was going out ' to the stables to look at the horses,' I 
naturally thought, as one fond of horseflesh, that it would 
be a fine sight to see Jones's stables, as he called them. 
I thought of three handsome carriage-horses sixteen 
hands high, a pair of pretty ponies for his wife to drive, 
some hunters, beauties to look at and tremendous fellows 
to go. The words used might even have justified the 
supposition of two or three racehorses, and several lads 
with remarkably long jackets walking about the yard. I 
was filled with fury when I learned that Jones's horses 
consisted of a large brougham-horse, broken-winded, and 
a spavined pony. I have known a man who had a 
couple of moorland farms habitually talk of his estate. 
One of the commonest and weakest ways of vapouring is 
by introducing into your conversation, very familiarly, 
the names of people of rank whom you know nothing 
earthly about. ' How sad it is,' said Mrs. Jenkins to me 
the other day, ' about the duchess being so ill ! Poor 
dear thing ! We are all in such great distress about her ! ' 
'•We air meant, of course, the landed aristocracy of the 
district, of which Mrs. Jenkins had lately become a mem- 
ber, Jenkins having retired from the hardware line and 
bought a small tract of quagmire. Some time ago a 
man told me that he had been down to Oatmealshire to 
see his tenantry. Of course he was not aware that I 
knew that he was the owner of just one farm. ' This is 
my parish we have entered,' said a youth of clerical ap- 
pearance to me in a railway carriage. In one sense it 



THE RAILWAY TRAIN. 229 

was ; but he would not have said so had he been aware 
that I knew he was the curate, not the rector. ' How can 
Brown and his wife get on ? ' a certain person observed to 
me ; ' they cannot possibly hve : they will starve. Think 
of people getting married with not more than eigJit or nine 
hundred a year ! ' How dignified the man thought he 
looked as he made the remark ! It was a fine thing to 
represent that he could not understand how human beings 
could do what he was well aware was done by multitudes 
of wiser people than himself. ' It is a cheap horse that 
of Wiggins's,' remarked Mr. Figgins ; ' it did not cost 
more than seventy or eighty pounds.' Poor silly Fig- 
gins fancies that all who hear him will conclude that his 
own broken-kneed hack (bought for £25) cost at least 
£150. Oh, silly folk who talk big, and then think you are 
adding to your importance, don't you know that you are 
merely making fools of yourselves ? In nine cases out 
of ten the person to whom you are relating your exag- 
gerated story knows what the precise fact is. He is too 
polite to contradict you and to tell you the truth, but rely 
on it he knows it. No one believes the vapouring story 
told by another man ; no, not even the man who fancies 
that his own vapouring story is believed. Every one 
who knows anything of the world knows how, by an 
accompanying process of mental arithmetic, to make the 
deductions from the big story told, which will bring it 
down to something near the truth. Frequently has my 
friend Mr. Snooks told me of the crushing retort by 
which he shut up Jeffrey upon a memorable occasion. I 
can honestly declare that I never gave credence to a syl- 
lable of what he said. Repeatedly has my friend Mr. 
Longbow told me of his remarkable adventure in the 
Bay of Biscay, when a whale very nearly swallowed 



230 HOW 1 MUSED IN 

him. Never once did T fail to li^ten'with every mark of 
implicit belief to my friend's narrative, but do you think 
I believed it ? And more than once has Mrs. O'Calla- 
ghan assured me that the hothouses on her fnwther's' 
esteet were three miles in length, and that each cluster 
of grapes grown on that favoured spot weighed above a 
hundred weight. With profound respect I gave ear to 
all she said ; but, gentle daughter of Erin, did you think 
I was as soft as I seemed? You may just as well tell 
the truth at once, ye big talkers, for everybody will know 
it, at any rate. 

It is a sad pity when parents, by a long course of big 
talking and silly pretension, bring up their children with 
ideas of their own importance which make them appear 
ridiculous, and which are rudely dissipated on their enter- 
ing into life. The mother of poor Lollipop, when he 
went to Cambridge, told me that his genius was such that 
he was sure to be Senior Wrangler. And possibly he 
might have been if he had not been plucked. 

It is peculiarly irritating to be obliged to listen to a 
vapouring person pouring out a string of silly exagger- 
ated stories, all tending to show how great the vapouring 
person is. Politeness forbids your stating that you don't 
believe them. I have sometimes derived comfort under 
such an infliction from making a memorandum, mentally, 
and then, hke Captain Cuttle, ' making a note' on the 
earliest opportunity. By taking this course, instead of 
being irritated by each successive stretch, you are rather 
gratified by the number and the enormity of them. I 
hereby give notice to all ladies and gentlemen whose 
conscience tells them that they are accustomed to vapour, 
that it is not improbable that I have in my possession a 
written list of remarkable statements made by them. It 



THE RAILWAY TRAIN. 231 

is possible that they would look rather blue if they were 
permitted to see it. 

Let me add, that it is not always vapouring to talk of 
one's self, even in terms which imj)]y a compliment. It 
was not vapouring when Lord Tenterden, being Lord 
Chief Justice of England, standing by Canterbury Cathe- 
dral with his son by his side, pointed to a little barber's 
shop, and said to the boy, ' I never feel proud except 
when I remember that in that shop your grandfather 
shaved for a penny ! ' It was not vapouring when 
Burke wrote, ' I was not rocked, and swaddled, and 
dandled into a legislator : Nitor in adversum is the motto 
for a man like me ! ' It was not vapouring when Milton 
wrote that he had in himself a conviction that ' by labour 
and intent study, which he took to be his portion in this 
life, he might leave to after age? something so written as 
that men should not easily let it die.' Nor was it 
vapouring, but a pleasing touch of nature, when the 
King of Siam begged our ambassador to assure Queen 
Victoria that a letter which he sent to her, in the English 
language, was composed and written entirely by himself 
It is not vapouring, kindly reader, when upon your 
return home after two or three days' absence, your little 
son, aged four years, climbs upon your knee, and begs 
you to ask his mother if he has not been a very good boy 
when you were away ; nor when he shows you, with great 
pride, the medal which he has won a few years later. It 
is not vapouring when the gallant man who heroically 
jeoparded life and limb for the women's and children's 
sake at Lucknow, wears the Victoria Cross over his 
brave heart. Nor is it a piece of national vapouring, 
though it is, sure enough, an appeal to proud remem- 
brances, when England preserves religiously the stout 



232 RAILWAY MUSINGS. 

old Victory, and points strangers to the spot where Nel- 
son fell and died. 

But a shrieking whistle yells in my ear : my musings 
are suddenly pulled up. The hundred miles are trav- 
ersed : the train is slackening its speed. It was half- 
past seven when we started : it is now about half-past 
eleven. We draw alongside the platform : there are 
faces I know. I see a black head over the palisade : 
that is my horse. It would be vapouring to say that my 
carriage awaits me ; for though it has four wheels, it is 
drawn by no more than four legs. Drag out a portman- 
teau from under the seat, exchange a cap for a hat, open 
the door, jump out, bundle away home. And then, per- 
haps, I may tell some unknown friends who have the 
patience to read my essays, How I mused in the railway 
train. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

CONCERNING THE MORAL INFLUENCES OF 
THE DWELLING. 




HEN the great Emperor Napoleon was 
packed off' to Elba, he had, as was usual 
with him, a sharp eye to theatrical effect. 
Indeed that distinguished man, during the 
period of his great elevation as well as of his great down- 
fall, was subject, in a degree almost unexampled, to the 
tynuniy of a principle which in the case of commonplace 
people finds expression in the representative inquiry, 
' What will Mrs. Grundy say ? ' Whenever Napoleon 
was about to do anything particular, or was actually 
doing anything particular, he was always thinking to 
himself, ' What will Mrs. Grundy say ? ' Of course his 
Mrs. Grundy was a much bigger and much more impor- 
tant individual than yoiir Mrs. Grundy, my reader. 
Your Mrs. Grundy is tlie ill-natured, tattling old tabby 
who lives round the corner, and whose window you feel 
as much afraid to pass as if it were a battery command- 
ing the pavement, and as if the ugly old woman's baleful 
eyes were so many Lancaster guns. Or perhaps your 
Mrs. Grundy is the goodnatured friend (as described by 
Mr. Sheridan) who is always ready to tell you of anything 
he has heard to your disadvantage, but who would not 



234 THE MORAL INFLUENCES 

for the world repeat to you aiij kind or pleasant remark, 
lest the vanity thereby fostered should injurioujdy affect 
your moral development. But Napoleon's Mrs. Grundy 
consisted of Great Britain and Ireland, Russia, Prussia, 
Austria, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Switz- 
erland, the United States ; in brief, to Napoleon, Mrs. 
Grundy meant Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. And 
really, when a man is asking himself what the whole 
civilized world will think and say about what he is 
doing, and when he feels quite sure that it will think and 
say something, it is excusable if in what he does he has 
an eye to what Mrs. Grundy will think and say. 

Accordingly, when the great Emperor was forced to 
exchange the imperial throne of France for the sover- 
eignty of that little speck in the Mediterranean, his first 
and most engrossing reflection on his journey to Elba 
was, what will Mrs. Grundy say ? And many thoughts 
not very pleasant to an ambitious man of unphilosophical 
temperament, would be suggested by the question. He 
would naturally think, Mrs. Grundy will be chuckling 
over my downfall. Mrs. Grundy will be saying that I, 
and all my aspirations and hopes, have been fearfully 
smashed. Mrs. Grundy will be saying, that it serves me 
right for my impudence. Mrs. Grundy \vill be saying 
(kindly) that it will do me a great deal of good. Ami- 
able and benevolent old lady ! Mrs. Grundy will be 
saying that I am now going away to my exile in very low 
spirits, feeling very bitter, very much disappointed, very 
thoroughly humbled, — going away (only Napoleon had 
not read Swift) in the extremity of impotent fury to 
' die in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.' Mrs. 
Grundy will be saying that when I get to Elba finally, I 
shall lead a poor life there ; kicking about the dogs and 



OF THE DWELLING. 235 

cats, swearing at the servants, whacking the horses 
viciously, perhaps even throwing phites at the attendants' 
heads. Such, tlie Emperor would think, will be the say- 
ings of Mrs. Grundy. And the F'.mperor, not a man of 
resigned or philosophical temper, would know that in all 
this Mrs. Grundy would be nearly right. But at all 
events, says Napoleon to himself, she shall not have the 
satisfaction of thinking that she is so. I shall mortify 
Mrs. Grundy by making her think that I am perfectly 
jolly. T shall get her to believe that all this humiliation 
which she has heaped upon me is impotent to touch me 
where T can really feel. She shall think that she has 
not found the raw. And so, when Napoleon settled at- 
Elba — stamped upon his coin, engraven upon his silver 
plate, emblazoned on his carriage panels, written upon 
his very china and crockery, — there blazed forth in Mrs. 
Grundy's view the defiant words, Ubicunque felix ! 

Now, had Mrs. Grundy had much philosophic insight 
into human conduct and motives, she would have known 
that her purpose of humiliation and embitterment was at- 
tained, and that all her ill-set sayings had proved right. It 
was because in Elba the great exile was a bitterly dis- 
appointed man, that he so ostentatiously paraded before 
the world the assurance that he was ' happy anywhere.' 
It was because he thought so much of Mrs. Grundy, and 
attached so much importance to what she might say, that 
he hung out this flag of defiance. If he ha^ really been 
as happy and as independent of outward circumstances as 
he said he was, he would not have taken the trouble to 
say so. Had Napoleon said nothing about himself, but 
begun to grow cabbages and train flowers, and grow fat 
and rosy, we should not have needed the motto. But if 
any man. Emperor or not, trumpet forth on the house- 



236 THE MORAL INFLUENCES 

tops that he is uhicunque felix ; and if we find him walk- 
ing moodily by the sea-shore, with a knitted brow and ab- 
sent air, and a very poor appetite, why, my reader, the 
answer to his statement may be conveyed, inarticulately, 
by a low and prolonged whistle ; or articulately, by an 
advice to address that statement to the marines. 

If there be a thing which I detest, it is a diffuse and 
rambling style. Let any writer always treat his subject 
in a manner terse and severely logical. My own model 
is Tacitus, and the earlier writings of Bacon. Let a man 
say in a straightforward way what he has got to say ; and 
the more briefly the better. And above all, young writer, 
avoid that fashion which is set by the leading articles of 
the Times, of beginning your observations upon a subject 
with something which to the ordinary mind appears to 
have nothing earthly to do with it. By carefully carry- 
ing out the advices here tendered to you, you may ulti- 
mately, after several years of practice, attain to a lim- 
ited success as an obscure third-rate essayist. 

Napoleon, then (to resume our argument after this lit- 
tle excursus), paraded before the world the declaration 
that it did not matter to him where he might be ; he 
w^ould be ' happy anywhere.' What tremendous non- 
sense he talked ! Why, setting aside altogether such 
great causes of difference as an unhealthy climate, stupid 
society or no society at all, usefulness or uselessness, hon- 
our or degradation, — I do not hesitate to say that the 
scenery amid which a man lives, and the house in which 
he lives, have a vast deal to do with making him what he 
is. The same man (to use an expression which is only 
seemingly Hibernian) is an entirely different man when 
put in a different place. Life is in itself a neutral thing) 
colourless and tasteless ; it takes its colour and its fla- 



OF THE DWELLTNCx. 237 

vour from the scenes amid whieli we lead it. Tt is like 
water, which external influences may make the dirtiest or 
cleanest, the bitterest or sweetest, of all things. Life, char- 
acter, feeling, are things very greatly dependent on exter- 
nal influences. In a larger sense than the common saying 
is usually understood, we are 'the creatures of circum- 
stances.' Only very stolid people are not affected by the 
scenes in which they live. I do not mean to say that an 
appreciable difference will be produced on a man's charac- 
ter by varied classes of scenery ; that is, that the same man 
will be appreciably different, morally, according as you 
place him for days on a rocky, stormy coast ; on a level 
sandy shore ; inland in a fertile wooded country ; inland 
among bleak wild hills ; among Scotch firs with their long 
bare poles ; horse-chestnuts blazing with their June blos- 
soms ; or thick full laurels, and yews, and hollies, thick to the 
ground, and shutting an external world out. I do not mean 
to say that ordinary people will feel any appreciable varia- 
tion of the moral and spiritual atmosphere, traceable for 
its cause to such variety of scene. A man must be fash- 
ioned of very delicate clay, he must have a nervous sys- 
tem very sensitive, morbidly sensitive perhaps, if such 
things as these very decidedly determine what he 
shall be, morally and intellectually, for the time. Yet 
no doubt such matters have upon many human be- 
ings a real effect. If you live in a country house into 
whose grounds you enter through a battlemented gateway 
under a lofty arch ; if the great leaves of the massive oak 
and iron gate are swung back to admit you, as you pass 
from the road outside to the sequestered pleasance within, 
where the grass, the gravel, the evergreens, the flowers, 
the winding paths, the little pond, the noisy little brook 
that passes beneath the rnstic bridge, are all cut off from 



238 THE MORAL INFLUENCES 

the outer world by a tall battlemeiited wall, too tall for 
leaping or looking over, — I think that, at first at least, 
you will have a different feeling all day, you will be a 
different man all day, for that arched gateway and that 
battlemented wall. You will not feel as if you had come 
in by a common five-bar gate, painted green, hung from 
freestone pillars five or six feet high, and shaded with 
laurels. It is wonderful what an effect is produced 
upon many minds by even a single external circum- 
stance such as that ; nor can I admit that there is any- 
thing morbid in the mind which is affected by such things. 
A very little thing, a solitary outward fact, may, by the 
influence of associations not necessarily personal, become 
idealized into something whose flavour reaches, like salt 
in cookery, perceptibly through all life. ' You may laugh 
as you please,' says one of the most thoyghtful and de- 
Hghtful of English essayists, 'but life seems somewhat 
insupportable to me without a pond — a squarish pond, 
not over clean.' You and I do not know, my readers, 
what early recollections may have made such a httle 
piece of water something whose presence shall appreci- 
ably affect the genial philosopher's feeling day by day, 
and hour by hour. The savour of its presence (I don't 
speak materially) may reach everywhere. And if there 
be anything which that writer is not, he is not morbid ; 
and he is not fanciful in the sense in which a fanciful per- 
son means a chronicler of morbid impressions. And we 
all remember the little child in Wordsworth's poem, who 
persisted in expressing a decided preference for one 
place in the country above another which appeared likely 
to have greater attractions ; and who, when pressed for 
his reasons, did, after much reflection, fix upon a single 
fact as the cause of his preference : — 



OF THE DWELLING. 239 

At Kilve tliere was no weathercock; 
And that's the reason why. 

No one can tell how that weathercock may have ob- 
truflcd it.self ui)on the little man's dreams, or how thor- 
oughly its presence may have permeated all his life. I 
know a little child, three years and a half old, whose en- 
tire life for many weeks appeared embittered by the pres- 
ence of a dinner-bell upon the hall-table of her home. 
She could not be induced to go near it; she trembled 
with terror when she heard it rung : it fulfilled for her 
the part of Mr. Thackeray's fjimous skeleton. And I am 
very sure that we have all of us dinner-bells and weather- 
cocks which haunt and worry us, and squarish ponds 
which give a savour to our life. And for any ordinary 
mortal to say that he is uhiciinque felix is pure nonsense. 
Napoleon found it was nonsense even at Elba ; and at St. 
Helena he found it yet more distinctly. No man can say 
truly that he is the same wherever he goes. That sub- 
lime elevation above outward circumstances is not attain- 
able by beings all of whom are half, and a great many of 
whom are a good deal more than half, material. We are 
all moral chameleons ; and we take the color of the ob- 
jects among which we are placed. 

Here am I this morning, writing on busily. I am all 
alone in a quiet little study. The prevailing colour 
around me is green — the chairs, tables, couches, book- 
cases, are all of oak, rich in colour, and growing dark 
through age, but green predominates : window-curtains, 
table-covers, carpet, rug, covers of chairs and couches, 
are green. I look through the window, which is some 
distance oft', right before me. The window is set in a 
frame of green leaves : it looks out on a quiet corner of 
the garden. There is a wall not far off* green with ivy and 



240 THE MORAL INFLUENCES 

other climbing plants ; there is a bright little bit of turf 
like emerald, and a clump of evergreens varying in 
shade. Over the wall I see a round green hill, crowned 
by oaks which autumn has not begun to make sere. 
How quiet everything is! I am in a comparatively re- 
mote part of the house, and there is no sound of house- 
hold litis ; no pattering of little feet ; no voices of ser- 
vants in discussion less logical and calm than might be 
desired. The timepiece above the fire-place ticks audi- 
bly ; the fire looks sleepy ; and I knovy that I may sit 
here all day if I please, no one interrupting me. No 
man worth speaking of will spend his ordinary day in 
idleness ; but it is pleasant to think that one may divide 
one's time and portion out one's day at one's own will 
and pleasure. Such a mode of life is still possible in this 
country : we do not all as yet need to live in a ceaseless 
hurry, ever drive, driving on till the worn-out machine 
breaks down. By and bye this life of unfeverish industry, 
and of work wdiose results are tangible only to people of 
cultivation, will no doubt cease ; and it will tend mate- 
rially to hasten that consummation when the views of the 
Times are carried out, and all the country clergy are re- 
quired to keep a diary like a rural policeman, showing 
how each hour of their time is spent, and open to the in- 
spection of their employers. Now, in a quiet scene like 
this, where there is not even the little noise of a village 
near, though I can hear the murmur of a pretty large 
river, must not the ordinary human being be a very dif- 
ferent being from what he would be were he sitting in 
some gas-lighted counting-house in Manchester, turning 
over large vellum-bound volumes, adding long rows of 
figures, talking on sales and prices to a hundred and fifty 
people in the course of the day, looking out through the 



OF THE DWELLING. 241 

window upon a foggy atmosphere, a muddy pavement, a 
crowded street, huge drays lumbering by with their great 
horses, with a general impression of noise, hurry, smoke, 
dirt, confusion, and no rest or peace ? It would be an 
interesting thing for some one equal to the task to go 
over Addison's papers in the Spectator^ and try to make 
out the shade of difference in them which might be con- 
ceived as resulting from the influences of the place where 
they were severally written. It is generally understood 
that the well-known letters by which Addison distin- 
guished his essays refei-red to the places where they 
were composed ; the letters in the Clio indicating Chel- 
sea, London, Islington, and tiie Office. Did the sensi- 
tive, shy genius feel that in the production dated from 
each scene there would be some trace of what Yan- 
kees call the surroundings amid which it was produced ? 
No doubt a mind like Addison's, impassive as he was, 
would turn off very difierent material according to the 
conditions in which the machine was working. As for 
Dick Steele, probably it made very Httle difference to 
him where he was : at the coffeehouse table, with noise 
and bustle all about him, he would write as quietly as 
though he had been quietly at home. He was indurated 
by long usage ; the hide of a hippopotamus is not sensi- 
tive to gentle influences which would be felt by your 
soft hand, my fair friend. But in the case of ordinary 
educated men there is no greater fallacy than that sug- 
gested by that vile old subject for Latin themes, that 
coelum, non animum mutant, qui trans mare curnint. 
Ordinary people, in changing the coelum, undergo a great 
change of the animus too. A judicious man would be 
extremely afraid of marrying any girl in England, and 
forthwith taking her out to India with him ; for it would 

16 



242 THE MORAL INFLUENCES 

be quite certain that she would be a very different per- 
son there from what she had been here ; and how differ- 
ent and in what mode altered and varied only experience 
could show. So one might marry one woman in York- 
shire, and live with quite another at Boggley-wollah ; 
and in marriage it is at least desirable to know what it is 
you are getting. Every one knows people who are quite 
different people according as they are in town or coun- 
try. I know a man — an exceedingly clever and learned 
man — who in town is sharp, severe, hasty, a very little 
bitter, and just a shade ill-tempered, who on going to the 
country becomes instantly genial, frank, playful, kind, 
and jolly : you would not know him for the same man if 
his face and form changed only half as much as his intel- 
lectual and moral nature. Many men, when they go to 
the country, just as they put off frock coats and stiff 
stocks, and put on loose shooting suits, big thick shoes, a 
loose soft handkerchief round their neck ; just as they 
pitch away the vile hard hat of city propriety that 
pinches, cramps, and cuts the hapless head, and replace 
it by the light yielding wideawake ; do mentally pass 
through a like process of relief: their whole spiritual 
being is looser, freer, less tied up. Such changes as that 
from town to country must, I should think, be felt by all 
educated people, and make an appreciable difference in 
the moral condition of all educated people. Few men 
would feel the same amid the purple moors round Ha- 
worth, and amid the soft English scenery that you see 
from Richmond Hill. Some individuals, indeed, whose 
mind is not merely torpid, may carry the same animus 
with them wherever they go; but their animus must be a 
very bad one. Mr. Scrooge, before his change of nature, 
was no doubt quite independent of external circum- 



OF THE DWELLING. 243 

stances, and would no doubt have thought it proof of 
great weakness had he not been so. Nor was it a being 
of an amiable character in whose mouth Milton has put 
the words, ' No matter where, so 1 be still the same ! ' 
And even in Ms mouth the sentiment was rather vapour- 
ing than true. But a dull, heavy, prosaic, miserly, can- 
tankerous, cynical, suspicious, bitter old rascal would prob- 
ably be much the same anywhere. Such a man's na- 
ture is indurated against all the influences of scenery, as 
much as the granite rock against sunshine and showers. 

I dare say there are few people who do not uncon- 
sciously admit the principle of which so much has been 
said. Few people can look at a pretty tasteful villa, all 
gables, turrets, bay windows, twisted chimneys, veran- 
dahs, and balconies, set in a pleasant little expanse of 
shrubbery, with some fine forest-trees, a green bit of 
open lawn, and some winding walks through clumps of 
evergreens, without tacitly concluding that the people 
who live there must lead a very different life from that 
which is led in a dull smoky street, and a blackened, 
gardenless, grassless, treeless house in town ; very dif- 
ferent even from the life of the people in the tasteless 
square stuccoed box, with a stiff gravel walk going up 
to its door, a few hundred yards off. If you are hav- 
ing a day's sail in a steamer, along a pretty coast dotted 
with pleasant villages, you cannot repress some notion 
that the human beings whom you see loitering about 
there upon the rocks, in that pure air and genial idle- 
ness, are beings of a different order from those around 
you. You feel that to set foot on that pier, and to min- 
gle with that throng, would carry you away a thousand 
miles in a moment ; and make you as different from 
what you are as though you had suddenly dropt Irom 



244 THE MORAL INFLUENCES 

the sky into that quiet voluptuous valley of Typee, 
where Hermann Melville was so perfectly happy till he 
discovered that all the kindness of the natives was in- 
tended to make him the fatter and more palatable 
against that festival at which he was to be eaten. And 
no wonder that he felt comfortable, if that happy valley 
was indeed what he assures us it was : 

There were no cares, griefs, troubles, or vexations, in all Typee. 
There were none of those thousand sources of irritation that the 
ingenuity of civilized man has created to mar his own felicity. 
There were no foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, no bills 
payable, no debts of honour, in Typee; no unreasonable tailors or 
shoemakers perversely bent on being paid, no duns of any descrip- 
tion, no assault and battery attornej'S to foment discord, backing 
their clients up to a quarrel, and then knocking their heads together; 
no poor relations everlastingly occupying the spare bedchamber, and 
diminishing the elbowroom at the family-table; no destitute widows, 
with their children starving on the cold charities of the world ; no 
beggars, no debtors' prisons, no proud and hard-hearted nabobs in 
Typee ; or, to sum up all in one word, — no Money ! That root of all 
evil was not to be found in the valley. 

In this secluded abode of happiness there were no cross old women, 
no cruel step-dames, no withered spinsters, no love-sick maidens, no 
sour old bachelors, no inattentive husbands, no melancholy young 
men, no blubbering youngsters, and no squalling brats. All was 
mirth, fun, and high good humour. 

It is pleasant to read such a description. It is like 
being carried suddenly from the Royal Exchange on a 
crowded afternoon, to a grassy, shady bank by the side 
of a country river. Probably most of us have trav- 
elled by railway through a wild country ; and when 
we stopped at some remote station among the hills, 
have wondered how the people there live, and thought 
how different their life must be from ours. Nor is it a 
mere fancy that takes possession of us when we look at 
the pretty Elizabethan dwelling, the thought of which 



OF THE DWELLING. 245 

carried us all the way to the South Pacific. If people 
are calm enough to be susceptible of external impres- 
sions, life really is very different there. I do not say it 
is necessarily happier ; but it is very different. Habit, 
indeed, equalizes the practical enjoyment of all lots, ex- 
cepting only those of extreme suffering and degrada- 
tion. Whatever level you get to in the scale of advan- 
tage, you soon get so accustomed to it that you do not 
mind much about it. When I used to study metaphys- 
ical philosophy, I remember that it appeared to me that 
this thought supplies by far the most serious of all 
objections to the doctrine (as taught by nature) of the 
Divine benevolence. It is a graver objection than the 
existence of positive evil. That may be conceived to 
be in some way inevitable; but why should it be that to 
get a thing instantly diminishes its value to half? I 
can think of a reason why ; and a good reason too : but 
it is not drawn from the domain of philosophy. A poor 
fellow, toiling wearily along the dusty road, thinks how 
happy that man must be who is just now passing him, 
leaning back upon the cushions of that luxurious car- 
riage, swept along by that pair of smoking thorough- 
breds. Of course the poor fellow is mistaken. The 
man in the carriage is no happier than he. And, in- 
deed, I can say conscientiously that the very saddest, 
most peevish, most irritable, and most discontented faces 
I have ever seen, I have seen looking out of extremely 
handsome carriage-windows. Luxury destroys real en- 
joyment. There is more real enjoyment in riding in a 
wheelbarrow than in driving in a carriao;e and four. 
Who does not remember the keen relish of the rapid 
run in the wheelbarrow of early youth, bumping and 
rolling about, and finally turning a corner at full speed 



246 THE MORAL INFLUENCES 

and upsetting ? Who does not remember the delight of 
the little springless carriage that threatened to dislocate 
and grind down the bones ? But it is indeed much to 
be lamented, that merely to get near the possession of 
any coveted thing instantly changes the entire look of it : 
it may still appear very good and desirable : but the 
I'omance is gone. When Mr. John Campbell, Student 
of Theology in St. Mary's College, St. Andrews, N. B., 
was working away at his Hebrew, or drilling the lads to 
whom he acted as tutor, and living sparingly on a few 
pounds a year, he would no doubt have thought it a 
tremendous thing if he had been told that he would yet 
be a peer — that he would be, first Lord Chief Justice 
and then Lord High Chancellor of England — and that 
he would, upon more than one great occasion, preside 
over the assembled aristocracy of Britain. But as he 
got on step by step the gradation took off the force of 
contrast : each successive step appeared natural enough, 
no doubt : and now, when he is fairly at the top of the 
tree, if that most amiable and able Judge should ever 
wish to realize his elevation, I suppose he can do so only 
by recurring in thought to the links of St. Andrews, and 
to the days when he drilled his pupils in Latin and 
Greek. Student of Divinity, newspaper reporter, utter 
barrister, King's Counsel, Solicitor-General, Member for 
Edinburgh, Attorney-General, Baron Campbell of St. 
Andrews, Chief Justice of England, Lord Chancellor of 
Great Britain — each successive point was natural 
enough when won, though the end made a great change 
from the Manse of Cupar. And when another Scotch 
clergyman's son, from a parish adjoining that of Lord 
Campbell's father, also went up to London about the 
same time, a poor struggling artist, he and all his family 



OF THE DWELLING. 247 

would doubtless have thought it a grand elevation. 
had they been told that he was to become one of the 
most distinguished members of the Royal Academy. 
There is something intensely affecting in the letters which 
the minister of Cults (it was a very poor living) sent to 
his boy in London, saying that he could, by pinching, 
send him, if needful, four or five pounds. But before 
Sir David became the great man he grew, old Mr. Wil- 
kie was in his grave : ' his son came to honour, and he 
knew it not.' No doubt it was better as it was ; but if 
you or I, kindly reader, had had the ordering of things, 
the wortliy man should have lived to see what would 
have gladdened his simple heart at last. 

Still, making every deduction for the levelling result of 
getting used to things, a great deal of the enjoyment of 
life, high or low, depends on the scenery amid which one 
dwells, and the house in wliich one lives — I mean the 
house regarded even in a merely aBsthetic point of view. 
It needs no argument to prove that if one's abode is sub- 
ject to the grosser physical disadvantages of smoky 
chimneys, damp walls, neighbouring bogs, incurable 
draughts, rattling windows, unfitting doors, and the like, 
the result upon the temper and the views of the man 
thus afflicted will not be a pleasing one. A constant suc- 
cession of little contemptible worries tends to foster a 
querulous, grumbling disposition, which renders a human 
being disagreeable to himself and intolerable to his 
frieuds. Real, great misfoi'tunes and trials may serve to 
ennoble tlie character ; but ever-recurring petty annoy- 
ances produce a littleness and irritability of mind. And 
while great misfortune at once engages our sympathy, 
petty annoyances ill borne make the sufferer a laugliing- 
gtock. There is something dignified in Napoleon smashed 



248 THE MORAL INFLUENCES 

at "Waterloo : there is nothing fine about Napoleon at St. 
Helena, swearing at his ill-made soup, and cursing up 
and down stairs at his insufficient allowance of clean 
shirts. But I am not now talking of abodes pressed by 
physical inconveniences. It is somewhat of a truism to 
say a man cannot be comfortable when he is uncomfort- 
able ; and that is the sum of what is to be said on that 
head. I mean now that one's home, assthetically regarded, 
has much influence upon our enjoyment of life. It is a 
great matter towards making the best of this world (and 
possibly, too. of the next), that our dwelling shall be a 
pretty one, a pleasant one, and placed amid pleasant 
scenes. It is a constant pleasure to live in such a home ; 
and it is a still greater pleasure to make it. I do not 
think I have ever seen happier people, or people who 
appeared more thoroughly enviable, than people who 
have been building a pretty residence in the country. 
Of course they must be building it for themselves to 
have the full satisfaction of it ; also it must not be too 
large ; and finally, it must not be bigger nor grander than 
they can afford. The last-named point is essential. A 
duke inherits his castle — he did not build it ; and it is 
too large and splendid for the peculiar feeling which I 
am describing. It has its own peculiar charms : the charm 
of vastness of dwelling and domain ; the charm of hoary 
age and historic memories, and of connexion with 
departed ancestors, and of associations which the mil- 
lions of the parvenu cannot buy. But it lacks the 
especial charm which Scott felt when he was building 
Abbotsford ; and which lesser men feel when sitting on a 
stone on a summer morning, and w^atclling the walls going 
up, listening to the clinking of the chisel, planning out 
the few acres of ground, and idealizing the life which is 



OF THE DWELLING. 249 

to be led there ; seeing with lialf-closed eyes that niiukly 
wheel-cut expanse all green and trim ; and little Jamie 
running about the walk which will be there in after-days; 
and little Lucy diligently planting weeds in the corner 
where her garden will be. Here, surely, we think, the 
last days or years may peacefully go by ; and here may 
we, though somewhat scarred in the battle of life, and 
somewhat worn with its cares, find a quiet haven at last. 
To me it is always pletisant reading when I fall in with 
books about planning and building such homes as these. 
At the mention of the Cottage, and even of the Villa 
(though I don't like that latter word, it sounds vulgar and 
cockneyfied and affected ; but I fear we must accept it, 
for there is no other which conveys the idea of the 
modest yet elegant country-house for people of refine- 
ment, but not of great means), there rises up before the 
mind's-eye, as if by an enchanter's wand, a whole life of 
quiet enjoyment. Surely, life in the cottage or the 
country-house might be made a very pleasing, pure, and 
happy thing. In that unbreathed air, amid those beauti- 
ful scenes, surrounded by the gentle processes and teach- 
ings of nature, it is but that outward nature and human 
life should, on some fair summer day, be wrought into 
a happy conformity ; and we should need no other 
heaven. Take the outward creation at her best, and for 
all the thorns and thistles of the Fall, she would do yet ! 
I find a great pleasure in reading books of practical 
architecture : and I have lately found out one by an 
American architect, one Mr. Calvert Vaux, whicli car- 
ries one into fresh fields. It is a large handsome volume, 
luxurious in the size of its type, and admirable for the 
excellence of its abundant illustrations. I have more to 
say of its contents by-and-bye, and shall here say only, 



250 THE MORAL INFLUENCES 

that to read such a book with pleasure, the reader must 
have some little imagination and a good deal of sympa- 
thy, so as not to rest on mere architects' designs and 
builders' specifications, but to picture out and enter into 
the quiet life which these suggest. Everything depends 
upon that. Therein lies the salt of such a book. The 
enjoyment of all things beyond eating and drinking arises 
out of our idealizing them. Do you think that a child 
who will spend an hour delightedly in galloping round 
the garden on his horse, which horse is a stick, regards 
that stick as the mere bit of wood ? No : that stick is to 
him instinct with imaginings of a pony's pattering feet 
and shaggy mane, and erect little ears. It is not so long 
since the writer was accustomed to ride on horseback in 
that inexpensive fashion, but what he can remember all 
that the stick was ; and remember too how sometimes 
fancy would flag, the idealizing power would break down, 
and from being a horse the stick became merely a stick, 
a dull, wearisome, stupid thing. And of what little 
things imagination, thus elevating and enclianting them, 
can make how much ! You remember the poor little 
solitary girl, in the wretched kitchen of Sally Brass, in 
the Old Curiosity Shop. Never was there life more 
bare of anything like enjoyment than the life which that 
poor creature led. Think, you folk who grumble at 
your lot, of a life whose features are sketched by such 
lines as a dark cellar, utter solitude, black beetles, cold 
potatoes, cuffs and kicks. Yet the idealizing power 
could convey some faint tinge of enjoyment even into the 
cellar of House of Brass. The poor little thing, when 
she made the acquaintance of Mr. Richard Swiveller, 
inquired of him had he ever tasted orange-peel wine. 
How was it made, he asked. The recipe was simple : 



OF THE DWELLING. 251 

take a tumbler of cold Avater, put a little bit of orange-peel 
into it, and the beverage is ready for use. It has not 
much taste, added the little solitary, unless you mahe he- 
Ueve very much. Sound and deep little philosopher ! 
We must apply the same presci'iption to life, and all by 
which life is surrounded. You are not to accept them 
as bare prosaic facts : you must make believe very much. 
Scott made believe very much at Abbotsford ; we all 
make believe very much at Christmas-time. Likewise 
at sight of the first snowdrop in springs after we have 
begun to grow old ; also when hawthorn blossoms and 
lilacs come again. And what a bare, cold, savourless 
life is sketched by the memorable lines which set before 
us the entire character of a man who could not make be- 
lieve: — 

In vain, through every changing j'car, 

Did natnre lead him as before; 
A primrose hy a river's brim, 
A yellow primrose was to him, — 

And it was nothing more! 

Let me recommend to the man with a taste for such 
subjects, INlr. Sanderson's Rural Architecture, a neat lit- 
tle manual of a hundred pages, with a number of draw- 
ings and ground-plans of labourers' cottages, pretty little 
villas, village schools, and farm-steadings. And any 
reader may call it his upon payment of one shilling. To 
the man who has learned to make believe, there will be 
more than a shilling's worth of enjoyment in the frontis- 
piece, which is a plain but pretty Gothic cottaj^e, sur- 
rounded with trees, a little retired from the ^-oad, which 
is reached through a neat rustic gateway, and with the 
spire of a village church two hundred yards off, peeping 
through trees and backed by quiet fields rising into hills 



252 THE MORAL INFLUENCES 

of no more than English height. A footpath winds 
through the field towards the clump of wood in which 
stands the church. The book is a sensible and well-in- 
formed one. Its author tells us, but not till the seven- 
tieth page of his hundred, that he is ' simply desirous of 
having an agreeable half-hour's chat with the reader, 
who may take a fancy to indulge in the instructive pas- 
time of building his own house, and who does not please 
to appear thoroughly ignorant of the matter he is about.' 

Mr. Sanderson appears from his book to have but a 
poor opinion of human nature. He is by no means a 
' confidence-man.' The book is full of cautions as to 
the necessity of closely watching work-people lest they 
should cheat you, and do their work in a dishonest and 
insufficient manner. I lament to say that my own little 
experience leads me to think that these cautions are by no 
means unnecessary. I do not think that builders and 
carpenters are as bad as horsedealers, whose word no 
man in his senses should regard as of the worth of a pin ; 
but it is extremely advisable to keep a sharp eye upon 
them while their work is progressing. Work improperly 
done, or done with insufficient materials, will certainly 
cause much expense and annoyance at a future day ; still, 
the constantly-recurring statements as to the likelihood of 
fraud, leave on one's mind an uncomfortable impression. 
Our race is not in a sound state. But perhaps it is too 
severe to judge that a decent-looking and well-to-do indi- 
vidual is a dishonest man, merely because he will at any 
time tell a lie to make a little money by it. 

There is a satisfaction in finding confirmation of one's 
own views in the writings of other men ; and so I 
quote with pleasure the following from Dr. Southwood 
Smith : — 



OF THE DWELLING. 2o3 

A clean, fresh, and Avell-ordered house exercises over its inmates a 
moral, no less than u physical influence, and has a direct tendenc}- to 
make the members of the family sol)er, peacenhle, and considerate of 
the feelings and happiness of each other; nor is it difficult to trace a 
connexion between habitual feelings of this sort and the formation of 
habits of respect for property, for the laws in general, and even for 
those higher duties and obligations the observance of which no hiws 
can enforce. Whereas, a filthy, squalid, unwholesome dwelling, in 
which none of the decencies common to society — even in the lowest 
stage of civilization — are or can be observed, tends to make every 
dweller in such a hovel regardless of the feelings and happiness of 
each other, selfish, and sensual. And the connexion is obvious be- 
tween the constant indulgence of appetites and passions of this class, 
and the formation of habits of idleness, dishonesty, debauchery, and 
violence. 

There is something very touching in a description in 
Household Words of the moral results of wretched dwell- 
ings, such as those in parts of Bethnal-green, in the east- 
ern region of London. Misery and anxiety have here 
crushed energy out ; the people are honest, but they are 
palsied by despair : — 

The people of this district are not criminal. A lady might walk 
unharmed at midnight through their wretched lanes. Crime demands 
a certain degree of energy ; but if there were ever any harm in these 
well-disposed people, it has been tamed out of them by sheer want. 
They have been sinking for years. Ten years ago, or less, the men 
were politicians; now, they have sunk below that stage of discontent. 
They are generally very still and hopeless; cherishing each other; 
tender not only towards their own kin, bu-t towards their neighbours; 
and they are subdued by sorrow to a manner strangely resembling 
the quiet and refined tone of the most polished cii'cles. 

Very true to nature ! How well one can understand 
the state of mind of a poor man quite crushed and spirit- 
broken : poisoned by ceaseless anxiety ; with no heart to 
do anything ; many a time wishing that he might but 
creep into a quiet grave ; and meanwhile trying to shrink 
out of sight and slip by unnoticed ! Despair nerves for 



254 THE MORAL INFLUENCES 

a little while, but constant care saps, and poisons, and pal- 
sies. Nor does it do so in Bethnal-green alone, or only 
in dwellings which are undrained and unventilated, and 
which cannot exclude rain and cold. Elsewhere, as 
many of my readers have perhaps learned for themselves, 
it has shattered many a nervous system, unstrung many 
a once vigorous mind, crushed down many a once hope- 
ful spirit, and aged many a man who should have been 
young by his years. 

I suppose it is now coming to be acknowledged by all 
men of sense, that it is a Christian duty to care for our 
fellow-creatures' bodies as well as for their souls ; and 
that it is hateful cant and hypocrisy to pray for the re- 
moval of diseases which God by the revelations of Na- 
ture has taught us may be averted by the use of physical 
means, while these means have not been faithfully em- 
ployed. When cholera or typhus comes, let us white- 
wash blackened walls, flush obstructed sewers, clear away 
intermural pigsties, abolish cesspools, admit abundant air 
and light, and supply unstinted water : — and having 
done all w'e can, let us then pray for God's blessing upon 
wdiat we have done, and for His protection from the 
plague which by these means we are seeking to hold 
away from us. Prayers and pains must go together alike 
in the physical and in the spiritual world. And I think 
it is now coming to be acknowledged by most rational 
beings, that houses ought to be pretty as well as healthy ; 
and that houses, even of the humblest class, may be pretty 
as well as healthy. By the Creator's kind arrangement, 
beauty and use go together ; the prettiest house will be 
the healthiest, the most convenient, and the most com- 
fortable. And I am persuaded that great moral results 



OF THE DWELLING. 2i)i> 

follow from pt'0[)le's houses being pretty as well as 
healthy. Every one understands at once that a wretched 
hovel, dirty, ruinous, stifling, bug-infested, dunghill sur- 
rounded, will destroy any latent love of neatness and 
orderliness in a poor man ; will destroy the love of home, 
that preservative against temptation which ranks next 
after religion in the heart, and send the poor man to the 
public-house, with all its ruinous temptations. But prob- 
ably it is less remembered than it ought to be, that the 
home of poor man or well-to-do man ought to be pleas- 
ing and inviting, as well as healthy. If not, he will 
not and cannot have the feeling towards it that it is de- 
sirable he should have. And all this is not less to be 
sought after in the case of people who are so well off that 
though their home afford no gratification of taste, and 
even lack the comfort which does not necessarily come 
with mere abundance, they are not likely to seek refuge 
at the ale-house, or to take to sottish or immoral courses 
of any kind. It makes an educated man domestic, it 
makes him a lover of neatness and accuracy, it makes 
him gentle and amiable (I mean in all but very extreme 
cases), to give him a pretty home. I wish it were gen- 
erally understood that it does not of necessity cost a shil- 
ling more to build a pretty house of a certain size, than 
to build a hideous one yielding the like accommodation. 
Taste costs nothing. If you have a given quantity of 
building materials to arrange in order, it is just as easy 
and just as cheap to arrange them in a tasteful and 
graceful order and collocation, as in a tasteless, irritating, 
offensive, and disgusting one. Elaborate ornament, of 
course, costs dear: but it does not need elaborate orna- 
ment to make a pleasing house which every man of taste 
will feel enjoyment in looking at. Simple gracefulness is 



256 THE MORAL INFLUENCES 

all that is essentially needful in cottage and villa archi- 
tecture. And in this aesthetic age, when there is a gen- 
eral demand for greater beauty in all physical appliances; 
when we are getting rid of the vile old willow-pattern, 
when bedroom crockery must be of graceful form and em- 
bellishment, when grates and fenders, chairs and couches, 
window curtains and carpets, oilcloth for lobby floors and 
paper for covering walls, must all be designed in con- 
formity with the dictates of an elevated taste, — it is not 
too much to hope that the day will come when every hu- 
man dwelHng that shall be built shall be so built and so 
placed that it shall form a picture pleasant to all men to 
look at. It is not necessary to say that this implies a 
considerable change from the state of matters at present 
existing in most districts of this country. And I trust it 
is equally unnecessary to say what school of domestic 
architecture must predominate if the day we wish for is 
ever to come. I trust that all my readers (excepting of 
course the one impracticable man in each hundred, who 
always thinks differently from everybody else, and always 
thinks wrong) will agree with me in holding it as an 
axiom needing no argument to support it, that every 
building which ranks under the class of villa or cottage, 
must, if intended to be tasteful or pleasing, be built in 
some variety of that grand school which is commonly 
styled the Gothic. 

I know quite well that there are many persons in this 
M'orld who would scout the idea that there is any neces- 
sity or any use for people who are not rich, to make any 
provision for their ideal life, for their taste for the beau- 
tiful. I can picture to myself some utilitarian old hunks, 
sharp-nosed, shrivelled-faced, with contracted brow, nar- 
row intellect, and no feeling or taste at all, who would be 



OF THE DWELLING. 257 

read}^ (so far as he was able) to ridicule my assertion 
that it is desirable and possible to provide something to 
gratify taste and to elevate and refine feeling, in the as- 
pect and arrangement of even the humblest human dwell- 
ings. Beauty, some donkeys think, is the right and 
inheritance of the wealthy alone ; food to eat, clothes to 
wear, a roof to shelter from the weather, are all that 
working men should pretend to. And indeed, if the se- 
cret belief of such dull grovellers were told, it would be 
that all people with less than a good many hundreds a 
year are stepping out of their sphere and encroaching on 
the demesne of their betters, when they aim at making 
their dwelling such that it shall please the cultivated eye 
as well as keep off wind and wet. Such mortals cannot 
understand or sympathize with the gratification arising 
from the contemplation of objects which are graceful and 
beautiful ; and they think that if there be such a gratifi- 
cation at all, it is a piece of impudence in a poor man to 
aim at it. It is, they consider, a luxury to which he has 
no right ; it is as though a ploughman should think to 
have champagne on his simple dinner-table. I verily 
believe that there are numbers of wealthy men, espe- 
cially in the ranks of those who have made their own 
wealth, and who receive little education in youth, who 
think that the supply of animal necessities is all that any 
mortal (but themselves, perhaps) can need. I have 
known of such a man, who said with amazement of a 
youtli whose health and life premature care was sap- 
ping, ' He is well-fed, and well-dressed, and well-lodged, 
and what the capital D more can the fellow want?' 
Why, if he had been a horse or a pig, lie would have 
wanted nothing more ; but the possession of a rational 
soul brings with it pressing wants which are not of a ma- 
17 



258 THE MORAL INFLUENCES 

terial nature, which are not to be supplied by material 
things, and which are not felt by pigs and horses. And 
the craving for surrounding objects of grace and beauty 
is one of these ; and it cannot be killed out but by many 
years of sordid money-making, or racking anxiety, or 
o-rinding want. The man whose whole being is given 
to finding food and raiment and sleep, is but a somewhat 
more intelligent horse. We have something besides a 
body, whose needs must be supplied ; or if not supplied, 
then crushed out, and we be brought thus nearer to the 
condition of being mere soulless bodies. Mr. Vaux has 
some just remarks on the importance of a pleasant home 
to the young. It is indeed a wretched thing when, 
whether from selfish heedlessness or mistaken principle, 
the cravings of youthful imagination and feeling are sys- 
tematically ignored, and life toned down to the last and 
most prosaic level. Says Mr. Vaux — 

It is not for ourselves alone, but for the sake of our children, that 
we should love to build our homes, whether they be villas, cottages, 
or log-houses, beautifully and well. The young people are mostly at 
home: it is their storehouse for amusement, their opportunity for 
relaxation, their main resource; and thus they are exposed to its in- 
fluence for good or evil unceasingly: their pliable, susceptible minds 
■take in its whole expression with the fullest possible force, and with 
unerring accuracy. It is only by degrees that the young hungry 
soul, born and bred in a hard, unlovely home, accepts the coarse fate 
to which not the poverty but the indifference of its parents condemns 
it. It is many many years before the irrepressible longing becomes 
utterly hopeless : perhaps it is never crushed out entirely ; but it is 
so stupified by slow degrees into despairing stagnation, if a perpet- 
ually recurrhig blank surrounds it, that it often seems to die, and to 
make no sign : the meagre, joyless, torpid home atmosphere in which 
it is forced to vegetate absolutely starves it out; and thus the good 
intention that the all-wise Creator had in view, when instilling a 
desire for the beautiful into the life of the infant, is painfully frus- 
trated. It is frequently from this cause, and from this alone, that an 
impulsive, high-spirited, light-hearted boy will dwindle by degrees 



OF THE DWELLING. 259 

into a sliav]), shrewd, narrow-minded, and selfisli youtli; from tlience 
again into a prudent, liard, and horn}- manhood; and at last into a 
covetous, unloving, and unloved old age. The single explanation is 
all-sufficient: he never had a pleasant home.* 

I trust my readers will conclude from this brief speci- 
men of Mr. Vaux's quality, that if he be as thoroughly 
up in the practice of pleasant rural architecture as he is 
in the philosophy of it, he will be a very agreeable archi- 
tect indeed. And, in truth, he is so, and his book is a 
very pleasant one. It is a handsome royal octavo vol- 
ume of above three hundred pages ; it is prodigally illus- 
trated with excellent wood-engravings, which show the 
man who intends building a country-house an abundance 
of engaging examples from which to clioose one. Nor 
are we shown merely a number of taking views in per- 
spective ; we have likewise the ground-plan of each floor, 
showing the size and height of each chamber; and fur- 
ther we are furnished with a careful calculation of the 
probable expense of each cottage or villa. Nor does Mr. 
Vaux's care extend only to the house proper : he shows 
some good designs for rustic gateways and fences, and 
some pretty plans for laying out and planting the piece of 
shrubbery and lawn which surrounds the abode. Amer- 
ica, every one knows, is a country where a man must 
push if he wishes to get on ; he must not be held back by 
any false modesty; and Mr. Vaux's book is not free 
from the suspicion of being a kind of advertisement of its 
author, who is described on the title-page as ' Calvert 
Vaux, Architect, late Downing and Vaux, of Newburgh, 
on the Hudson.' Then, on an otherwise blank page at 
the end of the volume, we find in large capiials the signifi- 
cant inscription, wliich renders it impossible for any one 

* Villas and Cottages, pp. 115, IIG. 



260 THE MOEAL INFLUENCES 

who reads the book to say that he does not know where 
to find Mr. Vaux when he wants him : — 

' Calvert Vaux, Architect, 

Appleton's Building, 

348, Broadway.'' 

American architecture appears to stand in sad need of 
improvement. Mr. Vaux tells us, no doubt very truly, 
that ' ugly buildings are the almost invariable rule.' In 
that land of measureless forests there is a building ma- 
terial common, which is little used now in Britain — to 
wit, wood. Still, wood will furnish the. material for very 
graceful and picturesque houses, even when in the rude 
form of logs ; and the true blight of housebuilding in 
America was less the poverty and the hurry of the early 
colonists, than their puritan hatred and contempt of art, 
and of everything beautiful. Further, the democratic 
spirit could not tolerate the notion of anything being suf- 
fered to flourish which, as was wrongly thought, was to 
minister to the delight of only a select few. 

American houses are for the most part square boxes, 
with no character at all. They are generally painted 
white, with bright green blinds : the effect is staring and 
ugly. In America, a perfectly straight line is esteemed 
the line of beauty, and a cube the most graceful of forms. 
Two large gridirons, laid across one another, exhibit the 
ground-plan of the large towns. Two smaller gridirons 
represent the villages. Mr. Vaux is strong for the use 
of graceful curves, and for laying out roads with some re- 
gard to the formation of the ground, and the natural 
features of interest. But a man of taste must meet 
many mortifications in a country where the following 
barbarity could be perpetrated : — 



OF THE DWELLING. 261 

In a case that recently occurred near a country town at some dis- 
tance from New York, a road was run through a very beautiful estate, 
one agreeable feature of wliicli was a pretty though small pond, that, 
even in the dryest seasons, was always full of water, and would have 
formed an agreeable adjunct to a country seat. A single straight pencil 
line on the plan doubtless marked out the direction of the road ; and as 
this line happened to go straight through the pond, straight through the 
pond was the road accordingly carried, the owner of the estate personal- 
ly superintending the operation, and thus spoiling his sheet of water, 
diminishing the value of his lands, and incurring expense by the cost of 
filling-in without any advantage whatever; for a winding road so laid 
out as to skirt the pond would have been far more attractive and agree- 
able than the harsh, straigtit line that is now scored like a railway track 
clear though the undulating surface of the property; and such barbar- 
isms are of constant occurrence. 

No doubt they are, and they are of frequent recurrence 
nearer home. I have known places where, if you are 
anxious to get a body of men to make any improvement 
u[)oii a church or school-house, it is necessary that you 
should support your plan solely by considerations of util- 
ity. Even to suggest the increase of beauty which would 
result would be quite certain to knock the entire scheme 
on the head. 

Some features of American house-building follow from 
the country and climate. Such are the verandahs, and 
the hooded-windows which form part of the design of 
every villa and every cottage represented in Mr. Vaux's 
book. The climate makes these desirable, and even es- 
sential. Such, too, is the abundance of houses built of 
wood, several designs for such houses being of consider- 
able pretension. And only a hurried and hasty people, 
with little notion of building for posterity, would accept 
the statement, that in building with brici^, eight inches 
thick are quite enough for the walls of any country-house, 
however large. The very slightest brick walls run up in 
England are, I believe, at least twelve inches thick. The 



262 THE MORAL INFLUENCES 

materials for roofing are very different from those to 
which we are accustomed. Slates are little used, having 
to be brought from England ; tin is not uncommon. 
Thick canvas is thought to make a good roof when the 
surface is not great ; zinc is a good deal employed ; but 
the favourite roofitig material is shingle, which makes a 
roof pleasing to American eyes. 



It is agreeably varied in surface, and assumes by age a soft 
pleasant, neutral tint that harmonizes with any colour that may be 
used in the building. 

I am not much captivated by Mr. Vaux's description 
of the representative American drawing-room, which, it 
appears, is entitled the best parlour: — 

The walls are hardfinished white, the woodwork is white, and a 
white marble mantlepiece is fitted over a fireplace which is never 
used. The floor is covered with a carpet of excellent quality, and of 
a large and decidedly sprawling pattern, made up of scrolls and flow- 
ers in gay and vivid colours. A round table with a cloth on it, and a 
thin layer of books in smart bindings, occupies the centre of the room, 
and furnishes about accommodation enough for one rather small per- 
son to sit and write a note at. A gilt mirror finds a place between 
the windows. A sofa occupies irrevocably a well-defined space 
against the wall, but it is just too short to lie down on, and too high 
and slippery with its spring convex seat to sit on with any comfort. 
It is also cleverly managed that points or knobs (of course ornamen- 
tal and french-polished) shall occur at all those places towards which 
a wearied head would naturally tend, if leaning back to snatch a few 
moments' repose from fatigue. There is also a row of black walnut 
chairs, with horse-hair (!) seats, all ranged against the white wall. 
A console-table, too, under the mirror, with a white marble top and 
thin gilt brackets. I think there is a piano. There is certainly a tri- 
angular stand for knickknacks, china, &c., and this, with some chim- 
ney ornaments, com]:)letes the furniture, which is all arranged accord- 
ing to stiff", immutable law. The windows and Venetian blinds are 
tightly closed, the door is tightly shut, and the best room is in conse- 
quence always ready — for what? For daily use? Oh, no; it is in 



OF THE DWELLING. 263 

every way too good for that. For AveeklyuseV Not even for that; 
but for company use. And thus the choice room, with the pretty view, 
is sacrificed to keep up a conventional show of finery which pleases 
no one, and is a great, though unacknowledged, bore to the pro- 
prietors. 

I am not sure that we in this country have much right 
to hiugh at the folly which maintains such chilly and com- 
fortless apartments. Even so uninhabited and useless is 
many a drawing-room which I could name on this side of 
the Atlantic. What an embodiment of all that is stiff, 
repellent, and uneasy, are the drawing-rooms of most 
widow ladies of limited means ! My space does not 
permit another extract from Mr. Vaux, in which he 
explains his ideal of the way in which a cottage parlour 
should be arranged and furnished. Very pleasantly he 
sketches an unpretending picture, in which snugness and 
elegance, the utile and the dulce, are happily and inex- 
pensively combined. But even here Mr. Vaux feels 
himself pulled up by a vision of a hard-headed and close- 
fisted old Yankee, listening with indignation, and bursting 
out with ' This will never do ! ' 

We talk about houses, my friend ; we look at houses ; 
but how little the stranger knows of what they are ! Search 
from cellar to garret some old country house, in which 
successive generations of boys and girls have grown up, 
but be sure that the least part of it is that which you can 
see, and not the most accurate inventory that ever was 
drawn up by appraiser will include half its belongings. 
There are old memories crowding about every corner of 
that home unknown to us : and to minds and hearts far 
away in India and Australia everything about it is 
sublimed, saddened, transfigured into something different 
from what it is to you and me. You know for yourself, 



264 MORAL INFLUENCES OF THE DWELLING. 

my reader, whether there be not something not present 
elsewhere about the window where you sat when a child 
and learned your lessons, the table once surrounded by 
many merry young faces which will not surround it 
again in this world, the fireside where your father sat, the 
chamber where your sister died. Very little indeed can 
sense do towards showing us the Home ; or towards 
showing us any scene which has been associated with 
human life and feeling and embalmed in human mem- 
ories. The same few hundred yards along the seashore, 
which are nothing to one man but so much ribbed sea- 
sand and so much murmuring water, may be to another 
something to quicken the heart's beating and bring the 
blood to the cheek. The same green path through the 
spring-clad trees, with the primroses growing beneath 
them, w^hich lives in one memory year after year with 
its fresh vividness undiminished, may be in another 
merely a vague recollection, recalled with difficulty or 
not at all. 

Each in his hidden sphere of joy or woe, 
Our hermit spirits dwell and range apart; 

Our eyes see all ai'ound in gloom or glow, — 
Hues of their own, fresh borrowed from the heart. 




CHAPTER IX. 
CONCERNING HURRY AND LEISURE. 

II what a blessing it is to have time to 
breathe, and think, and look around one I 
I mean, of course, that all this is a blessing 
to the man who has been overdriven : who 
has been living for many days in a breathless hurry, 
pushing and driving on, trying to get through his work, 
yet never seeing the end of it, not knowing to what task 
he ought to turn first, so many are pressing upon him 
altogether. Some folk, I am informed, like to live in 
a fever of excitement, and in a ceaseless crowd of occu- 
pations : but such folk form the minority of the race. 
Most human beings will agree in the assertion that it is a 
horrible feeling to be in a hurry. It wastes the tissues 
of the body ; it fevers the fine mechanism of the brain ; 
it renders it impossible for one to enjoy the scenes of 
nature. Trees, fields, sunsets, rivers, breezes, and the 
like, must all be enjoyed at leisure, if enjoyed at alL 
There is not the slightest use in a man's paying a hurried 
visit to the country. He may as well go there blindfold, 
as go in a hurry. He will never see the country. He 
will have a perception, no doubt, of hedgerows and grass, 
of green lanes and silent cottages, perhaps of great hills 
and rocks, of various items wliich go towards making 
the country ; but the country itself he will never see. 



266 CONCERNING HURRY 

That feverish atmosphere which he carries with him will 
distort and transform even individual objects ; but it will 
utterly- exclude the view of the whole. A circling Lon- 
don fog could not do so more completely. For quiet is 
the great characteristic and the great charm of country 
scenes ; and you cannot see or feel quiet when you are 
not quiet yourself. A man flying through this peaceful 
valley in an express train at the rate of fifty miles an 
hour might just as reasonably fancy that to us, its inhab- 
itants, the trees and hedges seem always dancing, rush- 
ing, and circling about, as they seem to him in looking 
from the window of the flying carriage ; as imagine that, 
when he comes for a day or two's visit, he sees these 
landscapes as they are in themselves, and as they look to 
their ordinary inhabitants. The quick pulse of London 
keeps with him : he cannot, for a long time, feel sensi- 
bly an influence so little startling, as faintly flavoured, 
as that of our simple country life. We have all be- 
held some country scenes, pleasing, but not very strik- 
ing, while driving hastily to catch a train for which we 
feared we should be late ; and afterwards, when we came 
to know them well, how different they looked ! 

I have been in a hurry. I have been tremendously 
busy. I have got through an amazing amount of work 
in the last few weeks, as I ascertain by looking over the 
recent pages of my diary. You can never be sure 
whether you have been working hard or not, except by 
consulting your diary. Sometimes you have an op- 
pressed and worn-out feeling of having been overdriven, 
of having done a vast deal during many days past ; when 
lo ! you turn to the uncompromising record, you test the 
accuracy of your feeling by that unimpeachable stand- 
ard ; and you find that, after all, you have accomplished 



AND LEISURE. 267 

very little. The discovery is mortifying, but it does you 
good ; and besides other results, it enables you to see how 
very idle and useless people, who keep no diary, may easily 
bring themselves to believe that they are among the hard- 
est-wrought of mortals. Tliey know they feel weary; 
they know they have been in a bustle and worry; they 
think they have been in it much longer than is the fact. 
For it is curious how readily we believe that any strong- 
ly-felt state of mind or outward condition — strongly felt 
at the present moment — has been lasting for a very long 
time. You have been in very low spirits : you fancy now 
that you have been so for a great portion of your life, or 
at any rate for weeks past : you turn to your diary, — 
why, eight-and-forty hours ago you were as merry as a 
cricket during the pleasant drive with Smith, or the 
cheerful evening that you spent with Snarling. I can 
well imagine that when some heavy misfortune befalls a 
man, he soon begins to feel as if it had befallen him a 
long, long time ago : he can hardly remember days 
which were not darkened by it : it seems to have been 
the condition of his being almost since his birth. And 
so, if you have been toiling very hard for three days — 
your pen in your hand almost from morning to night 
perhaps — rely upon it that at the end of those days, save 
for the uncompromising diary that keeps you right, you 
would have in your mind a general impression that you 
had been labouring desperately for a very long period — 
for many days, for several weeks, for a month or two. 
After heavy rain has fallen for four or live days, all per- 
sons who do not keep diaries invariably think that it has 
rained for a fortnight. If keen frost lasts in winter for a 
fortnight, all persons without diaries have a vague be- 
lief that there has been frost for a month or six weeks. 



268 CONCERNING HURRY 

You resolve to read Mr. Wordy's valuable History of the 
Entire Human Race throughout the ivhole of Time (I take 
for granted you are a young person) : you go at it every 
evening for a week. At the end of that period you have 
a vague uneasy impression, that you have been soaked 
in a sea of platitudes, or weighed down by an incubus of 
words, for about a hundred years. For even such is Hfe. 
Every human being, then, who is desirous of knowing 
for certain whether he is doing much work or little, ought 
to preserve a record of what he does. And such a rec- 
ord, I believe, will in most cases serve to humble him 
who keeps it, and to spur on to more and harder work. 
It will seldom flatter vanity, or encourage a tendency 
to rest on the oars, as though enough had been done. 
You must have laboured very hard and very constantly 
indeed, if it looks much in black and white. And how 
much work may be expressed by a very few words in 
the diary ! Think of Elihu Burrit's ' forged fourteen 
hours, then Hebrew Bible three hours.' Think of Sir 
Walter's short memorial of his eight pages before break- 
fast, — and what large and closely written pages they 
were ! And how much stretch of such minds as they 
have got — how many quick and laborious processes of 
the mental machinery — are briefly embalmed in the 
diaries of humbler and smaller men, in such entries as 
' after breakfast, walk in garden with children for ten 
minutes ; then Sermon on 10 pp. ; working hard from 
10 till 1 P.M. ; then left off with bad headache, and 
very weary ? ' The truth is, you can't represent work by 
any record of it. As yet, there is no way known of pho- 
tographing the mind's exertion, and thus preserving an 
accurate memorial of it. You might as well expect to 
find in such a general phase as a stormy sea the delinea- 



AND LEISURE. 269 

tion of the countless sliapes and transformations of the 
waves throughout several hours in several miles of ocean. 
as think to see in Sir Walter Scott's eight pages before 
breakfast an adequate representation of the hard, varied, 
wearing-out work that went to turn them off. And so it 
is, that the diarj which records the work of a very hard- 
wrought man, may very likely appear to careless, unsym- 
pathizing readers, to express not such a very laborious 
life after all. Who has not felt this, in reading the biog- 
raphy of that amiable, able, indefatigable, and over- 
wrought man. Dr. Kitto ? He worked himself to death 
by labour at his desk : but only the reader who has 
learned by personal experience to feel for him, is likely 
to see how he did it. 

But besides such reasons as these, there are strono- 
arguments why every man should keep a diary. I can- 
not imagine how many reflective men do not. How nar- 
row and small a thing their actual life must be ! They 
live merely in the present ; and the present is only a 
shifting point, a constantly progressing mathematical line, 
which parts the future from the past. If a man keeps 
no diary, the path crumbles away behind him as his feet 
leave it ; and days gone by are little more than a blank, 
broken by a few distorted shadows. His life is all con- 
fined within the limits of to-day. Who does not know 
how imperfect a thing memory is ? It not merely for- 
gets ; it misleads. Things in memory do not merely 
fade away, preserving as they fade their own lineaments 
so long as they can be seen : they change their aspect, 
they change their place, they turn to something quite dif- 
ferent from the fact. In the picture of the past, which 
memory unaided by any written record sets before us, 
the perspective is entirely wrong. IIow capriciously 



270 CONCERNING HURRY 

some events seem quite recent, which the diary shows are 
really far away ; and how unaccountably many things 
look far away, which in truth are not left many weeks 
behind us ! A man might almost as well not have lived 
at all as entirely forget that he has lived, and entirely 
forget what he did on those departed days. But I think 
that almost every person would feel a great interest in 
looking back, day by day, upon what he did and thought 
upon that day twelvemonths, that day three or five years. 
The trouble of writing the diary is very small. A few 
lines, a few words, written at the time, suffice, when you 
look at them, to bring all (what Yankees call) the sur- 
roundings of that season before you. Many little things 
come up again which you know quite well you never 
would have thought of again but for your glance at those 
words, and still which you feel you would be sorry to have 
forgotten. There must be a richness about the life of a 
person who keeps a diary, unknown to other men. And 
a million more little links and ties must bind him to the 
members of his family circle, and to all among whom he 
lives. Life, to him, looking back, is not a bare line, string- 
ing together his personal identity ; it is surrounded, inter- 
twined, entangled, with thousands and thousands of shght 
incidents, which give it beauty, kindliness, reality. Some 
folk's life is like an oak walking-stick, straight and var- 
nished ; useful, but hard and bare. Other men's life (and 
such may yours and mine, kindly reader, ever be), is like 
that oak when it was not a stick but a branch, and waved, 
leaf-enveloped, and with lots of Httle twigs growing out of 
it, upon the summer tree. And yet more precious than the 
power of the diary to call up again a host of little circum- 
stances and facts, is its power to bring back the inde- 
scribable but keenly-felt atmosphere of those departed 



AND LEISURE. 271 

days. The old time comes over you. It is not merely 
a collection, an aggregate of facts, that comes back ; it is 
something far more excellent than that : it is the soul of 
days long ago ; it is the dear Auld lany syne itself ! 
The perfume of hawthorn-hedges faded is there ; the 
breath of breezes that fanned our gray hair when it 
made sunny curls, often smoothed down by hands that 
are gone ; the sunshine on the grass where these old fin- 
gers made daisy chains ; and snatches of music, com- 
pared with which anything you hear at the Opera is 
extremely poor. Therefore keep your diary, my friend. 
Begin at ten years old, if you have not yet attained that 
age. It will be a curious link between the altered sea- 
sons of your Hfe ; there will be something very touching 
about even the changes which will pass upon your hand- 
writing. You will look back at it occasionally, and shed 
several tears of which you have not the least reason to 
be ashamed. No doubt when you look back, you will 
find many very silly things in it ; well, you did not think 
them silly at the time ; and possibly you may be humbler, 
wiser, and more sympathetic, for the fact that your diary 
will convince you (if you are a sensible person now), 
that probably you yourself, a few years or a great many 
years since, were the greatest fool you ever knew. Pos- 
sibly at some future time you may look back with simi- 
lar feelings on your present self: so you will see that it 
is very fit that meanwhile you should avoid self-confi- 
dence and cultivate humility ; that you should not be 
bumptious in any way ; and that you should bear, with 
great patience and kindliness, the follies of the young. 
Therefore, my reader, write up your diary daily. You 
may do so at either of two times: 1st. After breakfiist, 
whenever you sit down to your work, and before you be- 



272 CONCERNING HURRY 

gin your work ; 2nd. After you have done your indoors 
work, which ought not to be later than two p.m., and 
before you go out to your external duties. Some good 
men, as Dr. Arnold, have in addition to this brought up 
their history to the present period before retiring for the 
night. This is a good plan ; it preserves the record of 
the day as it appears to us in two different moods : the 
record is therefore more likely to be a true one, uncol- 
oured by any temporary mental state. Write down 
briefly what you have been doing. Never mind that 
the events are very little. Of course they must be ; but 
you remember what Pope said of little things. State 
what work you did. Record the progress of matters in 
the garden. Mention where you took your walk, or 
ride, or drive. State anything particular concerning the 
horses, cows, dogs, and pigs. Preserve some memorial 
of the progress of the children. Relate the occasions on 
which you made a kite or a water-wheel for any of them ; 
also the stories you told them, and the hymns you heard 
them repeat. You may preserve some mention of their 
more remarkable and old-fashioned sayings. Forsitan et 
olim hcec meminisse juvabit : all these things may bring 
back more plainly a little life when it has ceased ; and 
set before you a rosy little face and a curly little head 
when they have mouldered into clay. Or if you go, as 
you would rather have it, before them, why, when one of 
your boys is Archbishop of Canterbury and the other 
Lord Chancellor, they may turn over the faded leaves, 
and be the better for reading those early records, and 
not impossibly think some kindly thoughts of their gover- 
nor who is far away. Record when the first snowdrop 
came, and the earliest primrose. Of course you will 
mention the books you read, and those (if any) which 



AND LEISURE. 273 

you write. Preserve some memorial, in short, of every- 
thing that interests you and yours ; and look back each 
day, after you have written the few lines of your little 
chronicle, to see what you were about that day the pre- 
ceding year. No one who in this simple spirit keeps a 
diary, can possibly be a bad, unfeeling, or cruel man. 
No scapegrace or blackguard could keep a diary such as 
that which has been described. I am not forgetting that 
various blackguards, and extremely dirty ones, have kept 
diaries, but they have been diaries to match their own 
character. Even in reading Byron's diary, you can see 
that he was not so much a very bad fellow, as a very 
silly fellow, who thought it a grand thing to be esteemed 
very bad. When, by the way, will the day come when 
young men will cease to regard it as the perfection of 
youthful humanity to be a reckless, swaggering fellow, 
who never knows how much money he has or spends, 
who darkly hints that he has done many wicked 
things which he never did, who makes it a boast that 
he never reads anything, and thus who alFects to be even 
a more ignorant numskull than he actually is ? When 
will young men cease to be ashamed of doing right, 
and to boast of doing wrong (which they never did) ? 
'Thank God,' said poor Milksop to me the other day, 
' although I have done a great many bad things, I never 
did, &c. &c. &c.' The silly fellow fancied that 1 should 
think a vast deal of one who had gone through so much, 
and sown such a large crop of wild oats. I looked at 
him with much pity. Ah! thought I to myself, there 
are fellows who actually do the things you absurdly pre- 
tend to have done ; but if you had been one of those I 
should not have shaken hands with you live minutes 
since. With great ditliculty did 1 refrain from patting 

18 



274 CONCERNING HURRY 

his empty head, and saying, ' Oh, poor Milksop, you are 
a tremendous fool ! ' 

It is indeed to be admitted that by keeping a diary 
you are providing what is quite sure in days to come 
to be an occasional cause of sadness. Probably it will 
never conduce to cheerfulness to look back over those 
leaves. Well, you will be much the better for being sad 
occasionally. There are other things in this life than 
to put things in a ludicrous light, and laugh at them. 
Tliat^ too, is excellent in its time and place : but even 
Douglas Jerrold sickened of the forced fun of Punch, 
and thought this world had better ends than jesting. 
Don't let your diary fall behind : write it up day by 
day : or you will shrink from going back to it and con- 
tinuing it, as Sir Walter Scott tells us he did. You will 
feel a double unhappiness in thinking you are neglecting 
something you ought to do, and in knowing that to 
repair your omission demands an exertion attended with 
especial pain and sorrow. Avoid at all events that 
discomfort of diary-keeping, by scrupulous regularity : 
there are others which you cannot avoid, if you keep 
a diary at all, and occasionally look back upon it. It 
must tend to make thoughtful people sad, to be reminded 
of things concerning which we feel that we cannot think 
of them ; that they have gone wrong, and cannot now be 
set right ; that the evil is irremediable, and must just 
remain, and fret and worry whenever thought of; and 
life go on under that condition. It is like making up 
one's mind to live on under some incurable disease, not 
to be alleviated, not to be remedied, only if possible to 
be forgotten. Ordinary people have all some of these 
things : tangles in their life and affairs that cannot be 
unravelled and must be left alone : sorrowful things 



AND LEISURE. 275 

which they think cannot be helped. I think it higlily 
inexpedient to give way to such a feeling ; it ought to 
be resisted as far as it possibly can. The very worst 
thing that you can do with a skeleton is to lock the 
closet door upon it, and try to think no more of it. No: 
open the door : let in air and light : bring the skeleton 
out, and sort it manfully np : perhaps it may prove to 
be only the skeleton of a cat, or even no skeleton at all. 
There is many a house, and many a family, in which 
there is a skeleton, which is made the distressing night- 
mare it is, mainly by trying to ignore it. There is some 
fretting disagreement, some painful estrangement, made 
a thousand times worse by ill-judged endeavours to go 
on just as if it were not there. If you wish to get rid of 
it, you must recognise its existence, and treat it with 
frankness, and seek manfully to set it right. It is won- 
derful how few evils are remediless, if you fairly face 
them, and honestly try to remove them. Therefore, I 
say it earnestly, don't lock your skeleton-chamber door. 
If the skeleton he there, I defy you to forget that it is. 
And even if it could bring you present quiet, it is no 
healthful draught, the water of Lethe. Drugged rest 
is unrefreshful, and has painful dreams. And further ; 
don't let your diary turn to a small skeleton, as it is sure 
to do if it has fallen much into arrear. There will be a 
peculiar soreness in thinking that it is in arrear ; yet 
you will shrink painfully from the idea of taking to it 
aorain and bringing it up. Better to bes^in a fresh vol- 
ume. There is one thing to be especially avoided. ■ Do 
not on any account, upon some evening when you are 
pensive, down-hearted, and alone, go to the old volumes, 
and turn over the yellow pages with their faded ink. 
Never recur to volumes telling the story of years long 



276 CONCERNING HURRY 

ago, except at very cheerful times in very hopeful 
moods : — unless, indeed, you desire to feel, as did Sir 
Walter, the connexion between the clauses of the scrip- 
tural statement, that Ahithophel set his house in order 
and hanged himself. In that setting in order, wliat old, 
buried associations rise up again : what sudden pangs 
shoot through the heart, what a weight comes down upon 
it, as we open drawers long locked, and come upon the 
relics of our early selves, and schemes and hopes ! Well, 
your old diary, of even five or ten years since (espe- 
cially if you have as yet hardly reached middle age), is 
like a repertory in which the essence of all sad things 
is preserved. Bad as is the drawer or the shelf which 
holds the letters sent you from home when you were a 
schoolboy ; sharp as is the sight of that lock of hair of 
your brother, whose grave is baked by the suns of Hin- 
dostan ; riling (not to say more) as is the view of that 
faded ribbon or those withered flowers which you still 
keep, though Jessie has long since married Mr. Beest, 
v/ho has ten thousand a-year : they are not so bad, so 
sharp, so riling, as is the old diary, wherein the spirit of 
many disappointments, toils, partings, and cares, is dis- 
tilled and preserved. So don't look too frequently into 
your old diaries, or they will make you glum. Don't 
let them be your usual reading. It is a poor use of the 
past, to let its remembrances unfit you for the duties of 
the present. 

I have been in a hurry, I have said; but I am not so 
now. Probably the intelligent reader of the preceding 
pages may surmise as much. I am enjoying three days 
of delightful leisure. I did nothing yesterday : I am 
doing nothing to-day : I shall do nothing to-morrow. 
This is June: let me feel that it is so. When in a 



AND LEISURE. 277 

hurry, you do not realize that a month, more especially a 
summer month, has come, till it is gone. June : let it be 
repeated : the hafy month of June, to use the strong 
expression of Mr. Coleridge. Let me hear you imme- 
diately quote the verse, my young lady reader, in which 
that expression is to be found. Of course you can re- 
peat it. It is now very warm, and beautifully bright. 
I am sitting on a velvety lawn, a hundred yards from the 
door of a considerable country house, not my personal 
property. Under the shadow of a large sycamore is this 
iron chair ; and this little table, on which the paper looks 
quite green from the reflection of the leaves. There is 
a very little breeze. Just a foot from my hand, a twig 
with very large leaves is moving slowly and gently to 
and fro. There, the great serrated leaf has brushed the 
pen. The sunshine is sleeping (the word is not an 
affected one, but simply expresses the phenomenon) upon 
the bright green grass, and upon the dense masses of 
foliage which are a little way off on every side. Away 
on the left, there is a well-grown horse-chestnut tree, 
blazing with blossoms. In the little recesses where the 
turf makes bays of verdure going into the thicket, the 
grass is nearly as white with daisies as if it were covered 
with snow, or had several table-cloths spread out upon it to 
dry. Blue and green, I am given to understand, form an 
incongruous combination in female dress ; but how beau- 
tiful the little patches of sapphire sky, seen through the 
green leaves ! Keats was quite right ; any one who is 
really fond of nature must be very far gone indeed, when 
he or she, like poor Isabella with her pot of basil, ' forgets 
the blue above the trees.' I am specially noticing a 
whole host of little appearances and relations among the 
natural objects within view, which no man in a hurry 



278 CONCERNING HURRY 

would ever observe ; yet which are certainly meant to be 
observed, and worth observing. I don't mean to say that 
a beautiful thing in nature is lost because no human 
being sees it ; I have not so vain an idea of the impor- 
tance of our race. I do not think that that blue sky, 
with its beautiful fleecy clouds, was spread out there just 
as a scene at a theatre is spread out, simply to be looked 
at by us ; and -that the intention of its Maker is baulked 
if it be not. Still, among a host of other uses, which 
we do not know, it cannot be questioned that one end of 
the scenes of nature, and of the capacity of noting and 
enjoying them which is implanted in our being, is, that 
they should be noted and enjoyed by human minds and 
hearts. It is now 11.30 a.m., and I have nothing to do 
that need take me far from this spot till dinner, which 
will be just seven hours hereafter. It requires an unin- 
terrupted view of at least four or five hours ahead, to 
give the true sense of leisure. If you know you have 
some particular engagement in two hours, or even three 
or four, the feeling you have is not that of leisure. On 
the contrary you feel that you must push on vigorously 
with Avhatever you may be about; there is no time to sit 
down and muse. Two hours are a very short time. It 
is to be admitted that much less than half of that period 
is very long, when you are listening to a sermon ; and 
the man who wishes his life to appear as long as possible 
can never more effectually compass his end than by 
going very frequently to hear preachers of that numer- 
ous class whose discourses are always sensible and in 
good taste, and also sickeningly dull and tiresome. Half 
an hour under the instruction of such good men has 
oftentimes appeared like about four hours. But for quiet 
folk, living in the country, and who have never held the 



AND LEISURE. 270 

office of attorney-general or secretary of state, two hours 
form quite too short a vista to permit of sitting down to 
begin any serious work, such as writing a sermon or an 
article. Two hours will not afford elbow-room. One is 
cramped in it. Give me a clear prospect of five or six; 
so shall I begin an essay. It is quite evident that Ilaz- 
litt was a man of the town, accustomed to live in a hurry, 
and to fancy short blinks of unoccupation to be leisure, — 
even as a man long dwelling in American woods might 
think a little open glade quite an extensive clearing. He 
begins his essay on Living to One's-self, by saying that 
being in the country he has a fine opportunity of writing 
on that long contemplated subject, and of writing at 
leisure, because he has three hours good before him, not 
to mention a partridge getting ready for his supper. Ah, 
not enough ! Very well for the fast-going high-pressure 
London mind ; but quite insufficient for the deliberate, 
slow-running country one, that has to overcome a great 
inertia. How many good ideas, or at least ideas which 
he thinks good, will occur to the rustic writer ; and be 
cast aside when he reflects that he has but two hours to 
sit at his task, and that therefore he has not a moment to 
spare for collateral matters, but must keep to the even 
thread of his story or his argument ! A man who has 
four miles to walk within an hour, has little time to stop 
and look at the view on either hand ; and no time at 
all for scrambling over the hedge to gather some wild 
flowers. But now I rejoice in the feeling of an unlimited 
horizon before me, in the regard of time. Various new 
books are lying on the grass; and on the top of the 
heap, a certain number of that trenchant and brilliant 
periodical, the Saturday Review. This is delightful ! 
It is jolly ! And let us always be glad, if through 



280 CONCERNING HURRY 

training or idiosyncrasy we have come to this, my reader, 
that whenever you and 1 enjoy this tranquil feeling of 
content, there mingles with it a deep sense of gratitude. 
I should be very sorry to-day, if I did not know Whom to 
thank for all this. I like the simple, natural piety, which 
has given to various seats, at the top of various steep 
hills in Scotland, the homely name of Rest and be thank- 
ful! I trust I am now doing both these things. O ye 
men who have never been overworked and overdriven, 
never kept for weeks on a constant strain and in a 
feverish hurry, you don't know what you miss 1 Sweet 
and delicious as cool water is to the man parched with 
thirst, is leisure to the man just extricated from breath- 
less hurry ! And nauseous as is that same water to the 
man whose thirst has been completely quenched, is 
leisure to the man wliose life is nothing but leisure. 

Let me pick up that number of the Saturday Review^ 
and turn to the article which is entitled Smith's Drag.* 
That article treats of a certain essay which the present 
writer once contributed to a certain monthly magazine ; f 
and it sets out the desultory fashion in which his compo- 
sitions wander about.- I have read the article with great 
amusement and pleasure. In the main it is perfectly 
just. Does not the avowal say something for the writer's 
good-humour ? Not frequently does the reviewed ac- 
knowledge that he was quite rightly pitched into. Let 
me, however, say to the very clever and smart author of 
Smith's Drag, that he is to some extent mistaken in his 
theory as to my system of essay writing. It is not en- 
tirely true that I begin my essays with irrelevant descrip- 

*Jnne 4th, 1859, pp. 677-8. 

t ' Concerninn^ Man and his Dwelling-place.' — Ft^aser's Magazine, 
June, 1859, pp. 645-661. 



A.ND LEISURE. 281 

tions of scenery, liorses, and the like, merely because 
when reviewing a book of heavy metaphysics, I know 
nothing about my subject, and care nothing about it, and 
have nothing to say about it ; and so am glad to get over 
a page or two of my production without bond fide going 
at my subject. Such a consideration, no doubt, is not 
without its weight ; and besides this, holding that every 
way of discussing all things whatsoever is good except 
the tiresome, I think that even Smith's Drag serves a 
useful end if it pulls one a little way through a heavy 
discussion ; as the short inclined plane set Mr. Hensom's 
aerial machine off with a good start, without which it 
could not fly. But there is more than this in the case. 
The writer holds by a grand principle. The writer's 
great reason for saying something of the scenery amid 
which he is writing, is, that he believes that it materially 
affects the thought produced, and ought to be taken in 
connexion with it. You would not give a just idea of a 
country house by giving us an architect's elevation of its 
fagade, and showing nothing of the hills by which it is 
backed, and the trees and shrubbery by which it is sur- 
rounded. So, too, with thought. We think in time and 
space ; and unless you are a very great man, writing a 
book like Butler's Analogy, the outward scenes amid 
which you write will colour all your abstract thought. 
Most people hate abstract thought. Give it in a setting 
of scene and circumstances, and then ordinary folk will 
accept it. Set a number of essays in a story, however 
slight ; and hundreds will read them who would never 
have looked twice at the bare essays. Human interest 
and a sense of reality are thus communicated. When 
any one says to me, ' I think thus and thus of some 
abstract topic,' I like to say to him, ' Tell me where you 



282 CONCERNING HURRY 

thought it, how you thought it, what you were looking at 
when you thought it, and to whom you talked about it.' 
I deny that in essays what is wanted is results. Give 
rae processes. Show me how the results are arrived at. 
In some cases, doubtless, this is inexpedient. You would 
not enjoy your dinner if you inquired too minutely into 
the previous history of its component elements, before it 
appeared upon your table. You might not care for one 
of Goldsmith's or Sheridan's pleasantries, if you traced 
too curiously the steps by which it was licked into shape. 
Not so with the essay. And by exhibiting the making 
of his essay, as well as the essay itself when made, the 
essayist is enabled to preserve and exhibit many thoughts, 
which he could turn to no account did he exhibit only bis 
conclusions. It is a grand idea to represent two or three 
friends as discussing a subject. For who that has ever 
written upon abstract subjects, or conversed upon them, 
but knows that very often what seem capital ideas occur 
to him, which he has not had time to write down or to 
utter before he sees an answer to them, before he discov- 
ers that they are unsound. Now, to the essayist writing 
straightforward these thoughts are lost ; he cannot ex- 
hibit them. It will not do to write them, and then add 
that now he sees they are wrong. Here, then, is the 
great use — one great use- — of the Ellesmere and Duns- 
ford, who shall hold friendly council with the essayist. 
They, understood to be talking off-hand, can state all 
these interestifig and striking, though unsound views ; 
and then the more deliberate Milverton can show that 
they are wrong. And the three friends combined do but 
represent the phases of thought and feeling in a single 
individual : for who does not know that every reflective 
man is, at the very fewest, ' three gentlemen at once ? ' 



ANT) LEISURE. 283 

Let me say for myself, that it seems to me that no small 
part of the eharm which there is about the Friends in 
Council and the Companions of My Solitude arises fiom 
the use of the two expedients ; of exhibiting processes as 
well as results, of showing how views are formed as well 
as the views themselves ; and also of setting the whole 
abstract part of the work in a framework of scenes and 
circumstances. All this makes one feel a life-like reality 
in the entire picture presented, and enables one to open 
the leaves with a home-like and friendly sympathy. Do 
not fancy, my brilliant reviewer, that I pretend to write 
like that thoughtful and graceful author, so rich in wis- 
dom, in wit, in pathos, in kindly feeling. All I say is, 
that I have learned from him the grand principle, that 
abstract thought, for ordinary readers, must gain reality 
and interest from a setting of time and place. 

There is the green branch of the tree, waving about. 
The breeze is a little stronger, but still the air is perfectly 
warm. Let me be leisurely ; I feel a little hurried with 
writiiig that last paragraph ; I wrote it too quickly. To 
write a paragraph too quickly, putting in too much pres- 
sure of steam, will materially accelerate the pulse, lliat 
is an end greatly to be avoided. Who shall write hastily 
of leisure ! Fancy Izaak Walton going out fishing, and 
constantly looking at his watch every five minutes, for 
fear of not catching tlie express train in half an hour ! It 
would be indeed a grievous inconsistency. The old gen- 
tleman might better have stayed at home. 

It is all very well to be occasionally, for two or three 
days, or even for a fortnight, in a hurry. Every ear- 
nest man, with work to do, will find that occasionally 
there comes a pressure of it ; there comes a crowd of 



284 CONCERNING HURRY 

things which must be done quickly if they are done at 
all ; and the condition thus induced is hurry. I am 
aware, of course, that there is a distinction between 
haste and hurry — hurry adding to rapidity the element 
of painful confusion ; but in the case of ordinary people, 
haste generally implies hurry. And it will never do to 
become involved in a mode of life which implies a con- 
stant breathless pushing on. It must be a horrible 
thing to go through life in a hurry. It is highly expe- 
dient for all, it is absolutely necessary for most men, 
that they should have occasional leisure. Many enjoy- 
ments — perhaps all the tranquil and enduring enjoy- 
ments of life — cannot be felt except in leisure. And 
the best products of the human mind and heart can be 
brought forth only in leisure. Little does he know of 
the calm, unexciting, unwearying, lasting satisfaction of 
life, who has never known what it is to place the leis- 
urely hand in the idle pocket, and to saunter to and fro. 
Mind, I utterly despise the idler — the loafer, as Yan- 
kees term him, who never does anything — whose idle 
hands are always in his idle pockets, and who is always 
sauntering to and fro. Leisure, be it remembered, is 
the intermission of labour ; it is the blink of idleness in 
the life of a hard-working man. It is only in the case 
of such a man that leisure is dignified, commendable, or 
enjoyable. But to him it is all these, and more. Let 
us not be ever driving on. The machinery, physical 
and mental, will not stand it. It is fit that one should 
occasionally sit down on a grassy bank, and look list- 
lessly, for a long time, at the daisies around, and watch 
the patches of bright-blue sky through green leaves 
overhead. It is right to rest on a large stone by the 
maigin of a river ; to rest there on a summer day for a 



AND LEISURE. 285 

long time, and to watch the lapse of the water as it 
passes away, and to listen to its silvery ripple over the 
pebbles. Who but a blockhead will think you idle ? Of 
course blockheads may ; but you and I, my reader, do 
not care a rush for the opinion of blockheads. It is fit 
that a man should have time to chase his little children 
about the green, to make a kite and occasionally fly it, 
to rig a ship and occasionally sail it, for the happiness of 
those little folk. There is nothing unbecoming in mak- 
ing your Newfoundland dog go into the water to bring 
out sticks, nor in teaching a lesser dog to stand on his 
hinder legs. No doubt Goldsmith was combining leisure 
with work when Reynolds one day visited him ; but it 
was leisure that aided the work. The painter entered 
the poet's room unnoticed. The poet was seated at his 
desk, with his pen in his hand, and with his paper 
before him ; but he had turned away from The Travel- 
ler^ and with uplifted hand was looking towards a corner 
of the room, where a little dog sat with difficulty on his 
haunches, with imploring eyes. Reynolds looked over 
the poet's shoulder, and read a couplet whose ink was 
still wet : — 

Y,\ sports like these are all their cares beguiled; 
The sports of children satisfy the child. 

Surely, my friend, you will never again read that 
couplet, so simply and felicitously expressed, witliout 
remembering the circumstances in which it was written. 
Who should know better than Goldsmith what simple 
pleasures ' satisfy the child ? ' 

It is fit that a busy man should occasionally be able 
to stand for a quarter of an hour by the drag of his 
friend Smith ; and walk round the horses, and smooth 



286 CONCERNING HURRY 

down their fore-legs, and pull their ears, and drink in 
their general aspect, and enjoy the rich colour of their 
bay coats gleaming in the sunshine ; and minutely and 
critically inspect the drag, its painting, its cushions, its 
fur robes, its steps, its spokes, its silver caps, its lamps, 
its entire expression. These are enjoyments that last, 
and that cannot be had save in leisure. They are calm 
and innocent ; they do not at all quicken the pulse, or 
fever the brain ; it is a good sign of a man if he feels 
them as enjoyments : it shows that he has not indu- 
rated his moral palate by appliances highly spiced with 
the cayenne of excitement, all of which border on vice, 
and most of which imply it. 

Let it be remembered, in the praise of leisure, that 
only in leisure will the human mind yield many of its 
best products. Calm views, sound thoughts, healthful 
feelings, do not originate in a hurry or a fever. I do not 
forget the wild geniuses who wrote some of the finest 
English tragedies — men like Christopher Marlowe, 
Ford, Massinger, Dekker, and Otway. No doubt they 
lived in a whirl of wild excitement, yet they turned off 
many fine and immortal thouirhts. But their thought 
was essentially morbid, and their feeling hectic : all their 
views of life and things were unsound. And the beauty 
with which their writings are flushed all over, is like the 
beauty that dwells in the brow too transparent, the cheek 
too rosy, and the eye too bright, of a fair girl dying of 
decline. It is entirely a hot-house thing, and away from 
the bracing atmosphere of reality and truth. Its sweet- 
ness palls, its beauty frightens ; its fierce passion and its 
wild despair are the things in which it is at home. I do 
not believe the stories which are told about Jeffrey scrib- 
bling off his articles while dressing for a ball, or after re- 



AND LEISURE. 287 

turning from one at four in tlie morning : the fart is, 
notliing good for much was ever produced in that jaunty, 
hasty fashion, which is suggested by such a phrase aa 
scribbled off. Good ideas flash in a moment on the mind : 
but they are very crude then ; and they must be mel- 
lowed and matured by time and in leisure. It is pure 
nonsense to say that the Poetry of the Anti-jacobin was 
produced by a lot of young men sitting over their wine, 
very much excited, and talking very loud, and two or 
three at a time. Some happy impromptu hits may 
have been elicited by that mental friction ; but, rely 
upon it, the Needy Knife- Grinder, and the song whose 
chorus is Niversity of Gottingen, were composed when 
their author was entirely alone, and had plenty of time 
for thinking. Brougham is an exception to all rules : he 
certainly did write his Discourse of Natural Theology 
while rent asunder by all the multifarious engagements 
of a Lord Chancellor; but, after all, a great deal that 
Brougham has done exhibits merely the smartness of a 
sort of intellectual legerdemain ; and that celebrated 
Discourse, so far as I remember it, is remarkably poor 
stuff. I am now talking not of great geniuses, but of 
ordinary men of education, when 1 maintain tiiat to the 
labourer whose work is mental, and especially to the man 
whose work it is to write, leisure is a pure necessary of 
intellectual existence. There must be long seasons of 
quiescence between the occasional efforts of production. 
An electric eel cannot always be giving off sliocks. The 
shock is powerful, but short, and then long time is need- 
ful to rally for another. A tield, however good its soil, will 
not grow wheat year after year. Such a crop exhausts 
the soil : it is a strain to produce it ; and after it the tield 
must lie fallow for a while, — it must have leisure, in 



288 CONCERNING HURRY 

short. So is it with the mind. Who does not know that 
various Hterary electric eels, by repeating their shocks 
too frequently, have come at last to give off an electric 
result which is but the faintest and washiest echo of the 
thrilling and startHng ones of earlier days .^ Festus was 
a strong and unmistakeable shock ; The Angel World 
was much weaker ; The Mystic was extremely weak ; and 
The Age was twaddle. Why did the author let himself 
down in such a fashion ? The writer of Festus was a 
grand, mysterious image in many youthful minds : dark, 
wonderful, not quite comprehensible. The writer of 
The Age is a smart but silly little fellow, whom we could 
readily slap upon the back and tell him he had rather 
made a fool of himself. And who does not feel how 
weak the successive shocks of Mr. Thackeray and Mr. 
Dickens are growing ? The former, especially, strikes 
out nothing new. Anything good in his recent produc- 
tions is just the old thing, with the colours a good deal 
washed out, and with salt which has lost its savour. Poor 
stutF comes of constantly cutting and cropping. The po- 
tatoes of the mind grow small ; the intellectual wheat 
comes to have no ears ; the moral turnips are infected 
with the finger and toe disease. The mind is a reservoir 
which can be emptied in a much shorter time than it is 
possible to fill it. It fills through an infinity of little tubes, 
many so small as to act by capillary attraction. But in 
writing a book, or even an article, it empties as through a 
twelve-inch pipe. It is to me quite wonderful that most of 
the sermons one hears are so good as they are, consider- 
ing the unintermittent stream in which most preachers are 
compelled to produce them. I have sometimes thought, 
in listening to the discourse of a really thoughtful and 
able clergyman — If you, my friend, had to write a ser- 



AND LEISURE. 280 

mon once a month instead of once a week, how very 
admirable it would be ! 

Some stupid people are afraid of confessing that they 
ever have leisure. They wish to palm off upon the 
human race the delusion that they, the stupid people, 
are always hard at work. They are afraid of being 
thought idle unless they maintain this fiction. I have 
known clergymen who would not on any account take 
any recreation in their own parishes, lest they should 
be deemed lazy. They would not fish, they would not 
ride, they would not garden, they would never be seen 
leaning upon a gate, and far less carving their name 
upon a tree. What absurd folly! They might just as 
well have pretended that they did without sleep, or 
without food, as without leisure. You cannot always 
drive the machine at its full speed. I know, indeed, 
that the machine may be so driven for two or three 
years at the beginning of a man's professional life ; and 
that it is possible for a man to go on for such a period 
with hardly any appreciable leisure at all. But it 
knocks up the machine : it wears it out : and after an 
attack or two of nervous fever, we learn what we should 
have known from the beginning, that a far larger 
amount of tangible work will be accomplished by regu- 
lar exertion of moderate degree and continuance, than 
by going ahead in the feverish and unrestful fashion in 
which really earnest men are so ready to begin their 
task. It seems, indeed, to be the rule rather than the 
exception, that clergymen should break down in sti-ength 
and spirits in about three years after entering the 
church. Some die : but happily a larger number get 
well again, and for the remainder of their days work at 

19 



290 CONCERNING HURRY 

a more reasonable rate. As for the sermons written in 
that feverish stage of life, what crude and extravagant 
things they are : stirring and striking, perhaps, but hec- 
tic and forced, and entirely devoid of the repose, reality, 
and daylight feeling of actual life and fact. Yet how 
many good, injudicious people, are ever ready to expect 
of the new curate or rector an amount of work which 
man cannot do ; and to express their disappointment if 
that work is not done ! It is so very easy to map out a 
task which you are not to do yourself: and you feel so 
little wearied by the toils of other men ! As for you, 
my young friend, beginning your parochial life, don't be 
ill-pleased with the kindly-meant advice of one who 
speaks from the experience of a good many years, and 
who has himself known all that you feel, and foolishly 
done all that you are now disposed to do. Consider for 
how many hours of the day you can labour, without 
injury to body or mind : labour faithfully for those hours, 
and for no more. Never mind about what may be said 
by Miss Limejuice and Mr. Snarling. They will iind 
fault at any rate ; and you will mind less about their 
fault-finding, if you have an unimpaired digestion, and 
unaffected lungs, and an unenlarged heart. Don't pre- 
tend that you are always working : it would be a sin 
against God and Nature if you were. Say frankly. 
There is a certain amount of work that I can do ; and 
that I loill do : but I must have my hours of leisure. 1 
must have them for the sake of my parishioners as well 
as for my own ; for leisure is an essential part of that 
mental discipline which will enable my mind to grow 
and turn off sound instruction for their benefit. Leisure 
is a necessary part of true life ; and if I am to live at 
all, I must have it. Surely it is a thousand times better 



AND LEISURE. 291 

candidly and manfully to take up that ground, than to 
take recreation on the sly, as though you were ashamed 
of being found out in it, and to diso;nise your leisure as 
though it were a sin. I heartily despise the clergyman 
who reads Adam Bede secretly in his study, and when 
any one comes in, pops the volume into his waste-paper 
basket. An innocent thing is wrong to you if you think 
it wrong, remember. I am sorry for the man who is 
quite ashamed if any one finds him chasing his little chil- 
dren about the green before his house, or standing look- 
ing at a bank of primroses or a bed of violets, or a high 
wall covered with ivy. Don't give in to that feeling for 
one second. You are doing right in doing all that ; and 
no one but an ignorant, stupid, malicious, little-minded, 
vulgar, contemptible blockhead will think you are doing 
wrong. On a sunny day, you are not idle if you sit 
down and look for an hour at the ivied wall, or at an 
apple-tree in blossom, or at the river gliding by. You 
are not idle if you walk about your garden, noticing the 
progress and enjoying the beauty and fragrance of each 
individual rose-tree on such a charming June day as 
this. You are not idle if you sit down upon a garden 
seat, and take your little boy upon your knee, and talk 
with him about the many little matters which give 
interest to his little life. You are doing something 
which may help to establish a bond between you closer 
than that of blood ; and the estranging interests of after 
years may need it all. And you do not know, even as 
regards the work (if of composition) at which you are 
busy, what good ideas and impulses may come of the 
quiet time of looking at the ivy, or the blossoms, or the 
stream, or your child's sunny curls. Such things often 
start thoughts which might seem a hundred miles away 



292 CONCERNING HURRY 

from them. That they do so, is a fact to which the 
experience of numbers of busy and thoughtful men can 
testify. Various thick skulls may think the statement 
mystical and incomprehensible : for the sake of such let 
me confirm it by high authority. Is it not curious, by 
the way, that in talking to some men and women, if you 
state a view a httle beyond their mark, you will find 
them doubting and disbelieving it so long as they regard 
it as resting upon your own authority ; but if you can 
quote anything that sounds like it from any printed 
book, or even newspaper, no matter how little worthy 
the author of the article or book may be, you will find 
the view received with respect, if not with credence ? 
The mere fact of its having been printed, gives any 
opinion whatsoever much weight with some folk. And 
your opinion is esteemed as if of greater value, if you 
can only show that any human being agreed with you in 
entertaining it. So, my friend, if Mr. Snarling thinks it 
a delusion that you may gain some thoughts and feelings 
of value, in the passive contemplation of nature, inform 
him that the following lines were written by one Words- 
worth, a stamp-distributor in Cumberland, regarded by 
.many competent judges as a very wise man : — 

Why, William, on that old grey stone, 

Thus for the length of half a day, 
Why, William, sit you thus alone. 

And dream your time away? 

One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake, 
When life was sweet, I knew not why, 

To me my good friend Matthew spake, 
And thus I made reply : 

The eye, — it cannot choose but see; 
We cannot bid the ear be still: 



AND LEISURE. 293 

Our bodies feel, where'er they be, 
Against or with our will. 

Nor less I deem that there are Powers, 
Which of themselves our minds impress; 

That we can feed this mind of ours. 
In a wise passiveness. 

Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum. 

Of things for ever speaking, 
That nothing of itself will come, 

But we must still be seeking? 

Then ask not wherefore, here, alone. 

Conversing as I may, 
I sit upon this old grey stone. 

And dream m^' time away ! 

Such an opinion is sound and just. Not that 1 beheve 
that instead of sending a lad to Eton and Oxford, it 
would be expedient to make him sit down on a grey 
stone, by the side of any lake or river, and wait till 
wisdom came to him through the gentle teaching of 
nature. The instruction to be thus obtained must be 
supplementary to a good education, college and pro- 
fessional, obtained in the usual way ; and it must be 
sought in intervals of leisure, intercalated in a busy and 
energetic life. But thus intervening, and coming to sup- 
plement other training, I believe it will serve ends of the 
most valuable kind, and elicit from the mind the very 
best material which is there to be elicited. Some people 
say they work best under pressure : De Quincey, in a 
recent volume, declares that the conviction that he must 
produce a certain amount of writing in a limited time 
has often seemed to open new cells in his brain, rich in 
excellent thought ; and I have known preachers (very 
poor onesj declare that their best sermons were written 



294 CONCERNING HURRY 

after dinner on Saturday. As for the sermons, the best 
were bad ; as for De Quincey, he is a wonderful man. 
Let us have elbow room, say I, when we have to write 
anything ! Let there be plenty of time, as well as plenty 
of space. Who could write if cramped up in that cham- 
ber of torture, called Little Ease, in which a man could 
neither sit, stand, nor he, but in a constrained fashion ? 
And just as bad is it to be cramped up into three days, 
when to stretch one's self demands at least six. Do you 
think Wordsworth could have written against time ? Or 
that In Memoriam was penned in a hurry ? 

Said Miss Limejuice, I saw Mr. Swetter, the new 
rector, to-day. Ah ! she added, with a malicious smile, 
I fear he is growing idle already, though he has not been 
in the parish six months. I saw him, at a quarter before 
two precisely, standing at his gate with his hands in his 
pockets. I observed that he looked for three minutes 
over the gate into the clover field he has got. And then 
Smith drove up in his drag, and stopped and got out ; 
and he and the rector entered into conversation, evi- 
dently about the horses, for I saw Mr. Swetter walk 
round them several times, and rub down their fore-legs. 
Now / think he should have been busy writing his 
sermon, or visiting his sick. Such, let me assure the 
incredulous reader, are the words which I have myself 
heard Miss Limejuice, and her mother, old Mrs. Snarl- 
ing Limejuice, utter more than once or twice. Knowing 
the rector well, and knowing how he portions out his 
day, let me explain to those candid individuals the state 
of facts. At ten o'clock precisely, having previously 
gone to the stable and walked round the garden, INIr. 
Swetter sat down at his desk in his study and worked 



AND LEISURE. 295 

hard till one. At two he is to ride up the parish to see 
various sick persons among the cottagers. But from one 
to two he has laid his work aside, and tried to banish all 
thought of his work. During that period he has been 
running about the green with his little boy, and even 
rolling upon the grass ; and he has likewise strung 
together a number of daisies on a thread, which you 
might have seen round little Charlie's neck if you had 
looked sharply. He has been unbending his mind, you 
see, and enjoying leisure after his work. It is entirely 
true that he did look into the clover field and enjoy the 
fragrance of it, which you probably regard as a piece of 
sinful self-indulgence. And his friend coming up, it is 
likewise certain that he examined his horses (a new pair), 
with much interest and minuteness. Let me add, that 
only contemptible humbugs will think the less of him for 
all this. The days are past in which the ideal clergyman 
was an emaciated eremite, who hardly knew a cow from 
a horse, and was quite incapable of sympathizing with 
his humbler parishioners in their little country cares. 
And some little knowledge as to horses and cows, not to 
mention potatoes and turnips, is a most valuable attainment 
to the country parson. If his parishioners find that he is 
entirely ignorant of those matters which they understand 
best, they will not unnaturally draw the conclusion that 
he knows nothing. While if they find that he is fairly 
acquainted with those things which they themselves un- 
derstand, they will conclude that he knows everything. 
Helplessness and ignorance appear contemptible to sim- 
ple folk, though the helplessness should appear in the 
lack of power to manage a horse, and the ignorance in a 
man's not knowing the way in which potatoes are planted. 
To you, Miss Limejuice, let me further say a word as to 



296 CONCERNING HURRY 

your parish clergyman. Mr. Swetter, you probably do 
not know, was Senior Wrangler at Cambridge. He 
chose his present mode of life, not merely because he 
felt a special leaning to the sacred profession, though he 
did feel that strongly ; but also because he saw that in 
the Church, and in the care of a quiet rural parish, he 
might hope to combine the faithful discharge of his duty 
with the enjoyment of leisure for thought; he might 
be of use in his generation without being engaged to that 
degree that, like some great barristers, he should grow a 
stranger to his children. He concluded that it is one 
great happiness of a country parson's life, that he may 
work hard without working feverishly ; he may do his 
duty, yet not bring on an early paralytic stroke. Swetter 
might, if he had liked, have gone in for the Great Seal ; 
the man who was second to him will probably get it; but 
he did not choose. Do you not remember how Baron 
Alderson, who might well have aspired at being a Chief 
Justice or a Lord Chancellor, fairly decided that the prize 
was not worth the cost, and was content to turn aside 
from the worry of the bar into the comparative leisure 
of a puisne judgeship ? It was not worth his while, he 
rightly considered, to run the risk of working himself to 
death, or to live for years in a breathless hurry. No 
doubt the man who thus judges must be content to see 
others seize the great prizes of human affairs. Hot and 
trembling hands, for the most part, grasp these. And 
how many work breathlessly, and give up the tranquil 
enjoyment of life, yet never grasp them after all ! 

There is no period at which the feeling of leisure is a 
more delightful one, than during breakfast and after 
breakfast on a beautiful summer morning in the country. 



AND LEISURE. 297 

It is a slavish and painful thing to know that instantly 
you rise from the break fiist-table you must take to your 
work. And in that case your mind will be fretting and 
worrying away all the time that tlie hurried meal lasts. 
But it is delightful to be able to breakfast leisurely ; to 
read over your letters twice ; to skim the Times, just to 
see if there is anything particular in it (the serious read- 
ing of it being deferred till later in the day) ; and then 
to go out and saunter about the garden, taking an inter- 
est in whatever operations may be going on there ; to 
walk down to the little bridge and sit on the parapet, 
and look over at the water foaming through below; to 
give your dogs a swim ; to sketch out the rudimentary 
outline of a kite, to be completed in the evening; to stick 
up, amid shrieks of excitement and delight, a new col- 
oured picture in the nursery ; to go out to the stable and 
look about there ; — and to do all this with the sense 
that there is no neglect, that you can easily overtake your 
day's work notwithstanding. For this end the country 
human being should breakfast early; not later than nine 
o'clock. Breakfast will be over by half-past nine ; and 
the half hour till ten is as much as it is safe to give to 
leisure, without running the risk of dissipating the mind 
too much for steady application to work. After ten one 
does not feel comfortable in idling about, on a common 
working-day. You feel that you ought to be at your 
task ; and he who would enjoy country leisure must be- 
ware of fretting the fine mechanism of his moral percep- 
tions by doing anything which he thinks even in the least 
degree wrong. 

And here, after thinking of the preliminary half hour 
of leisure before you sit down to your work, let me ad- 
vise that when you fairly go at your work, if of composi- 



298 CONCERNING HURRY 

tion, you should go at it leisurely. I do not mean that 
you should work with half a will, with a wandering atten- 
tion, with a mind running away upon something else. 
"What I mean is, that you should beware of flying at 
your task, and keeping at it, with such a stretch, that 
every fibre in your body and your mind is on the strain, 
is tense and tightened up ; so that when you stop, after 
your two or three hours at it, you feel quite shattered and 
exhausted. A great many men, especially those of a 
nervous and sanguine temperament, write at too high a 
pressure. They have a hundred and tw^enty pounds on 
the square inch. Every nerve is like the string of Robin 
Hood's bow. All this does no good. It does not appreci- 
ably affect the quality of the article manufactured, nor 
does it much accelerate the rate of production. But it 
wears a man out awfully. It sucks him like an orange. 
It leaves him a discharged Leyden jar, a torpedo en- 
tirely used up. You have got to walk ten miles. You 
do it at the rate of four miles an hour. You accomplish 
the distance in two hours and a half; and you come in, 
not extremely done up. But another day, with the same 
walk before you, you put on extra steam, and walk at 
four and a half miles an hour, perhaps at five. {Mem. : 
People who say they walk six miles an hour are talking 
nonsense. It cannot be done, unless by a trained pedes- 
trian.) You are on a painful stretch all the journey : 
you save, after all, a very few minutes ; and you get to 
your journey's end entirely knocked up. Like an over- 
driven horse, you are off' your feed ; and you can do 
nothing useful all the evening. I am well aware that the 
good advice contained in this paragraph will not have the 
least effect on those who read it. Fungar inani mwiere. 
I know how little all this goes for with an individual 



AND LEISURE. 299 

now not far away. And, indeed, no one can say that 
because two men have produced the same result in work 
accomphshcd, therefore they have gone through the same 
amount of exertion. Nor am I now thinking of the vast 
differences between men in point of intellectual power. 
I am content to suppose that they shall be, intellect- 
ually, precisely on a level : yet one shall go at his work 
with a painful, heavy strain; and another shall get 
through his lightly, airily, as if it were pastime. One 
shall leave off fresh and buoyant ; the other, jaded, lan- 
guid, aching all over. And in this respect, it is probable 
that if your natural constitution is not such as to enable 
you to work hard, yet leisurely, there is no use in advising 
you to take things easily. Ah, my poor friend, you can- 
not ! But at least you may restrict yourself from going at 
any task on end, and keeping yourself ever on the fret un- 
til it is fairly finished. Set yourself a fitting task for 
each day; and on no account exceed it. There are men 
■who have a morbid eagerness to get through any work on 
which they are engaged. They would almost wish to go 
right on through all the toils of life and be done with 
them ; and then, like Alexander, ' sit down and rest.' 
The prospect of anything yet to do, appears to render 
the enjoyment of present repose impossible. There can 
be no more unhealthful state of mind. The day will 
never come when we shall have got through our work : 
and well for us that it never will. Why disturb the 
quiet of to-night, by thirdving of the toils of to-morrow ? 
There is deep wisdom, and accurate knowledge of hu- 
man nature, in the advice, given by the Soundest and 
Kindest of all advisers, and applicable in a hundred cases, 
to ' Take no thought for the morrow.' 

It appears to me, that in these days of hurried life, a 



300 CONCERNING HURRY 

great and valuable end is served by a class of things 
which all men of late have taken to abusing, — to wit, 
the extensive class of dull, heavy, uninteresting, good, 
sensible, pious sermons. They afford many educated men 
almost their only intervals of waking leisure. You are 
in a cool, quiet, solemn place : the sermon is going for- 
ward : you have a general impression that you are listen- 
ing to many good advices and important doctrines, and 
the entire result upon your mind is beneficial ; and at the 
same time there is nothing in the least striking or start- 
ling to destroy the sense of leisure, or to painfully arouse 
the attention and quicken the pulse. Neither is there a 
syllable that can jar on the most fastidious taste. All 
points and corners of thought are rounded off. The en- 
tire composition is in the highest degree gentlemanly, 
scholarly, correct ; but you feel that it is quite impossible 
to attend to it. And you do not attend to it ; but at the 
same time, you do not quite turn your attention to any- 
thing else. Now, you remember how a dying father, 
once upon a time, besought his prodigal son to spend an 
hour daily in solitary thought : and what a beneficial 
result followed. The dull sermon may serve an end as 
desirable. In church you are alone, in the sense of being 
isolated from all companions, or from the possibility of 
holding communication with anybody ; and the weari- 
some sermon, if utterly useless otherwise, is useful in 
giving a man time to think, in circumstances which will 
generally dispose him to think seriously. There is a 
restful feeling, too, for which you are the better. It is a 
fi.ne thing to feel that church is a place where, if even for 
two hours only, you are quite free from worldly business 
and cares. You know that all tiiese are waiting for you 
outside : but at least you are free from their actual endur- 



AND LEISURE. 301 

ance here. I am persuaded, and I am liappy to entertain 
the persuasion, that men are often much the better for 
being present during the preaching of sermons to which 
they pay very little attention. Only some such belief as 
this could make one think, without much sorrow, of the 
thousands of discourses which are preached every Sun- 
day over Britain, and of the class of ears and memories 
to which they are given. You see that country congre- 
gation coming out of that ivy-covered church in that 
beautiful churchyard. Look at their faces, the plough- 
men, the dairy-maids, the drain-diggers, the stable-boys : 
what could they do towards taking in the gist of that well- 
reasoned, scholarly, elegant piece of composition which 
has occupied the last half-hour ? Why, tliey could not 
understand a sentence of it. Yet it has done them good. 
The general effect is wholesome. They have got a little 
push, they have felt themselves floating on a gentle 
current, going in the right direction. Only enthusiastic 
young divines expect the mass of their congregation to 
do all they exhort them to do. You must advise a man 
to do a thing a hundred times, probably, before you can 
get him to do it once. You know that a breeze, blowing 
at thirty-five miles an hour, does very well if it carries a 
large ship along in its own direction at the rate of eight. 
And even so, the practice of your hearers, though truly 
influenced by what you say to them, lags tremendously 
behind the rate of your preaching. Be content, my 
friend, if you can maintain a movement, sure though 
slow, in the right way. And don't get angry with your 
rural flock on Sundays, if you often see on their blank 
faces, while you are preaching, the evidence that they 
are not taking in a w'ord you say. And don't be entirely 
discouraged. You may be doing them good for all that. 



302 CONCERNING HURRY 

And if you do good at all, you know better than to grum- 
ble, though you may not be doing it in the fashion that 
you would like best. I have known men, accustomed to 
sit quiet, pensive, half-attentive, under the sermons of an 
easy-going but orthodox preacher, who felt quite indig- 
nant when they went to a church where their attention 
was kept on the stretch all the time the sermon lasted, 
whether they would or no. They felt that this intrusive 
interest about the discourse, compelling them to attend, 
was of the nature of an assault, and of an unjustifiable in- 
fraction of the liberty of the subject. Their feehng was, 
* What earthly right has that man to make us listen to 
his sermon, without getting our consent ? We go to 
church to rest : and lo ! he compels us to listen ! ' 

I do not forget, musing in the shade this beautiful sum- 
mer day, that there may be cases in which leisure is very 
much to be avoided. To some men, constant occupation 
is a thing that stands between them and utter wretched- 
ness. You remember the poor man, whose story is so 
touchingly told by Borrow in The Romany Rye, who lost 
his wife, his children, all his friends, by a rapid succes- 
sion of strokes ; and who declared that he would have 
gone mad if he had not resolutely set himself to the study of 
the Chinese language. Only constant labour of mind could 
' keep the misery out of his head.' And years afterwards, 
if he paused from toil for even a few hours, the misery 
returned. The poor fisherman in The Antiquary was 
wrong in his philosophy, when Mr. Oldbuck found him, 
with trembling hands, trying to repair his battered boat 
the day after his son was buried. ' It's weel wi' you gen- 
tles,' he said, ' that can sit in the house wi' handkerchers 
at your een, when ye lose a freend ; but the like o' us 
maun to our wark again, if our hearts were beating as 



AND LEISURE. 303 

bard as my hammer ! ' We love the kindly sympathy 
that made Sir Walter write the words : but bitter as 
may be the effort with which the poor man takes to his 
heartless task again, surely he will all tlie sooner get over 
his sorrow. And it is with gentles, who can ' sit in the 
house ' as long as they like, that the great grief longest 
lingers. There is a wonderful efficacy in enforced work 
to tide one over every sort of trial. I saw not long since 
a number of pictures, admirably sketched, which had 
been sent to his family in England by an emigrant son in 
Canada, and which represented scenes in daily life there 
among the remote settlers. And I w^as very much struck 
with tlie sad expression which the faces of the emigrants 
always wore, whenever they were represented in repose 
or inaction. I felt sure that those pensive faces set forth 
a sorrowful fact. Lying on a great bluff', looking down 
upon a lovely river ; or seated at the tent-door on a Sun- 
day, when his task was laid apart ; — however the back- 
woodsman was depicted, if not in energetic action, there 
was always a very sad look upon the rough face. And 
it was a peculiar sadness — not like that which human 
beings would feel amid the scenes and friends of their 
youth : a look pensive, distant, full of remembrance, de- 
void of hope. You glanced at it, and you thought of 
Lord Eglintoun's truthful lines : — ■ 

From the lone shieling on the misty island, 
Mountains divide us, and a world of seas: 

But still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland, 
And Ave in dreams behold the Hebrides : 

Fair these broad meads, these hoary woods are grand, — 

But we are exiles from our fathers' land ! 

And you felt that much leisure will not suit there. 
Therefore, you stout backwoodsman, go at the huge for- 



304 CONCERNING HURRY 

est-tree : rain upon it the blows of your axe, as long as 
you can stand ; watch the fragments as they fly ; and 
jump briskly out of the way as the reeling giant falls: — 
for all this brisk exertion will stand between you and 
remembrances that would unman you. There is nothing 
very philosophical in the plan, to ' dance sad thoughts 
away,' which I remember as the chorus of some Cana- 
dian song. I doubt whether that peculiar specific will 
do much good. But you may ivorh sad thoughts away ; 
you may crowd morbid feelings out of your mind by 
stout daylight toils ; and remember that sad remem- 
brances, too long indulged, tend strongly to the maudlin. 
Even Werter was little better than a fool ; and a con- 
temptible fool was Mr. Augustus Moddle. 

How many of man's best works take for granted that 
the majority of cultivated persons, capable of enjoying 
them, shall have leisure in which to do so. The archi- 
tect, the artist, the landscape-gardener, the poet, spend 
their pains in producing that which can never touch the 
hurried man. I really feel that I act unkindly by the 
man who did that elaborate picking-out in the paint- 
ing of a railway carriage, if I rush upon the platform at 
the last moment, pitch in my luggage, sit down and take 
to the Times, without ever having noticed whether the 
colour of the carriage is brown or blue. There seems a 
dumb pleading eloquence about even the accurate diag- 
onal arrangement of the little woollen tufts in tlie mo- 
rocco cushions, and the interlaced network above one's 
head, where umbrellas go, as though they said, ' We are 
made thus neatly to be looked at, but we cannot make 
you look at us unless you choose ; and half the people 
who come into the carriage are so hurried that they 



AND LEISURE. 305 

never notice us.' And when I have seen a fine church- 
spire, rich in graceful ornament, rising up by the side o£ 
a city street, where hurried crowds are always passing 
by, not one in a thousand ever casting a glance at the 
beautiful object, I have thought, Now surely you are not 
doing what your designer intended ! When he spent so 
much of time, and thought, and pains in planning and exe- 
cuting all those beauties of detail, surely he intended 
them to be looked at ; and not merely looked at in their 
general effect, but followed and traced into their lesser 
graces. But he wrongly fancied that men would have 
time for that ; he forgot that, except on the solitary artis- 
tic visitor, all he has done would be lost, through the 
nineteenth century's want of leisure. And you, architect 
of Melrose, when you designed that exquisite tracery, 
and decorated so perfectly that flying buttress, were you 
content to do so for the pleasure of knowing you did your 
work thoroughly and well ; or did you count 6n its pro- 
ducing on the minds of men in after ages an impression 
which a prevailing hurry has prevented from being pro- 
duced, save perhaps in one case in a thousand ? And 
you, old monk, who spent half your life in writing and 
illuminating that magnificent Missal ; was your work its 
own reward in the pleasure its execution gave you ; or 
did you actually fancy tliat mortal man would have time 
or patience — leisure, in short — to examine in detail all 
that you have done, and that interested you so much, and 
kept you eagerly engaged for so many hours together, on 
days the world has left four hundred years behind ? I 
declare it touches me to look at that laborious appeal to 
men with countless hours to spare : men, in short, hardly 
now to be found in Britain. No doubt, all this is the old 
story : for how great a part of the higher and finer hu- 
20 



306 CONCERNING HURRY AND LEISURE. 

man work is done in the hope that it will produce an 
effect which it never will produce, and attract the inter- 
est of those who will never notice it ! Still, the ancient 
missal-writer pleased himself with the thought of the ad- 
miration of skilled observers in days lo come ; and so the 
fancy served its purpose. 

Thus, at intervals through that bright summer day, 
did the writer muse at leisure in the shade ; and note 
down the thoughts (such as they are) which you have 
here at length in this essay. The sun was still warm 
and cheerful when he quitted the lawn ; but somehow, 
looking back upon that day, the colours of the scene are 
paler than the fact, and the sunbeams feel comparatively 
chill. For memory cannot bring back things freshly as 
they lived, but only their faded images. Faces in the 
distant past look wan ; voices sound thin and distant ; the 
landscape round is uncertain and shadowy. Do you not 
feel somehow, when you look back on ages forty centu- 
ries ago, as if people then spoke in whispers and lived in 
twilight ? 



CHAPTER VIII. 

CONCERNING THE WORRIES OF LIFE, AND 
HOW TO MEET THEM. 




;UT now to my proper task. I have certain 
suggestions to offer Concerning the Worries 
of Life, and How to Meet them. I am 
quite aware that the reader of a meta- 
physical turn, after he has read my essay, may be 
disposed to find fault with its title. The plan which is to 
be advocated for the treatment of the Worries of Life, 
can only in a modified sense be described as Meeting 
them. You cannot be said to face a thing on which you 
turn your back. You cannot accurately be described as 
meeting a man whom you walk away from. You do 
not, in strictness, regard a thing in any mode or fashion, 
which you do not regard at all. But, after intense 
reflection, I could devise no title that set out my subject 
so well as the present : and so here it is. Perfection is 
not generally attainable in human doings. It is enough, 
if tilings are so, that they ivill do. No doubt this is no 
excuse for not making them as good as one can. But 
the fact is, as you get older, you seldom have time to 
write down any plausible excuse, before you see a crush- 
ing answer to it. The man who has thought longest, 
comes back to the point at which the man stands who has 
hardly thought at all. He feels, more deeply year by 



308 CONCERNING THE WORRIES OF LIFE, 

year, the truth of the grand axiom, that Much may he 
said on Both Sides. 

Now, my reader, you shall have, in a very brief space, 
the essence of my Theory as to the treatment of Human 
Worry. 

Let us picture to ourselves a man, living in a pleasant 
home, in the midst of a beautiful country. Pleasing 
scenes are all around him, wherever he can look. There 
are evergreens and grass : fields and hedgerows : hills 
and streams ; in the distance, the sea ; and somewhat 
nearer, the smoke of a little country town. Now, what 
would you think of this man, if he utterly refused to 
look at the cheerful and beautiful prospects which every- 
where invite his eye ; and spent the whole day gazing 
intently at the dunghill, and hanging over the pigsty ? 
And all this though his taste were not so peculiar as to 
lead him to take any pleasure in the contemplation of the 
pigsty or the dunghill ; all this, though he had a more 
than ordinary dislike to contemplate pigsties or dunghills ? 
No doubt, you would say the man is a monomaniac. 

And yet, my reader, don't you know (possibly from 
your own experience) that in the moral world many men 
and women do a thing precisely analogous, without ever 
being suspected of insanity ? Don't you know that mul- 
titudes of human beings turn away from the many bless- 
ings of their lot, and dwell and brood upon its worries? 
Don't you know that multitudes persistently look away 
from the numerous pleasant things they might contem- 
plate, and look fixedly and almost constantly at painful 
and disagreeable things ? You sit down, my friend, in 
your snug library, beside the evening fire. The blast 
without is hardly heard through the drawn curtains. 
Your wife is there, and your two grown-up daughters. 



AND HOW TO MEET THEM. 309 

You feel thankful that after the bustle of the day, you 
have this quiet retreat where you may rest, and refit 
yourself for another day with its bustle. But the con- 
versation goes on. Nothing is talked of but the fail- 
ings of the servants and the idleness and impudence of 
your boys ; unless indeed it be the supercilious bow with 
which Mrs. Snooks that afternoon passed your wife, and 
the fact that the pleasant dinner-party at which you 
assisted the evening before at Mr. Smith's, has been 
ascertained to have been one of a second-chop character, 
his more honoured guests having dined on the previous 
day. Every petty disagreeable in your lot, in short, is 
brought out, turned ingeniously in every possible light, 
and aggravated and exaggerated to the highest degree. 
The natural and necessary result follows. An hour, or 
less, of this discipline brings all parties to a sulky and 
snappish frame of mind. And instead of the cheerful 
and thankful mood in which you were disposed to be 
when you sat down, you find that your whole moral nature 
is jarred and out of gear. And your wife, your daugh- 
ters, and yourself, pass into moody, sullen silence, over 
your books — books which you are not likely for this 
evening to much appreciate or enjoy. Now, I put it to 
every sensible reader, whether there be not a great deal 
too much of this kind of thing. Are there not families 
that never spend a quiet evening together, without 
embittering it by raking up every unpleasant subject in 
their lot and history ? There are folk who, both in their 
own case and that of others, seem to find a strange satis- 
faction in sticking the thorn in the hand farther in : even 
in twisting the dagger in the lieart. Their lot has its 
innumerable blessings, but they will not look at these. 
Let the view around in a hundred directions be ever so 



310 CONCERNING THE WORRIES OF LIFE, 

charming, they cannot be got to turn their mental view 
in one of these. They persist in keeping nose and eyes 
at the moral pigsty. 

Oh, what a blessing it would be if we human beings 
could turn away our mind's eye at will, as we can our 
physical ! As we can turn away from an ugly view in 
the material world, and look at a pleasing one ; if we 
could but do the like in the world of mind ! As you 
turn your back on a dunghill, or a foul stagnant ditch : 
if you could so turn your back on your servants' errors, 
on your children's faults, on the times when you made a 
fool of yourself, on the occasions when sad disappoint- 
ment came your way, — in short, upon those prospects 
which are painful to look back upon ! You go to bed, I 
may assume, every evening. How often, my friend, 
have you tossed about there, hour after hour, sleepless 
and fevered, stung by care, sorrow, worry : as your mem- 
ory persisted in bringing up again a thousand circum- 
stances which you could wish for ever forgot : as each 
sad hour and sad fact came up and stuck its little sting 
into 3^our heart ! I do not suppose that you have led a 
specially wicked hfe ; I do not write for blackguards ; I 
suppose your life has been innocent on the whole, and 
your lot prosperous : — I assume no more than the aver- 
age of petty vexations, mortifications, and worries. You 
remember how that noble man. Sir Charles Napier, tells 
us in his Diary, that sometimes, when irritated by having 
discovered some more than usually infamous job or 
neglect, or stung by a keener than ordinary sense of the 
rascally injustice which pursued him through life, he 
tossed about all night in a half-frantic state, shouting^ 
praying, and blaspheming. Now, whether you be a great 
man or a little man, when you lay your head on your 



AND HOW TO MEET THEM. 311 

thorny pillow, have you not longed oftentimes for the 
power of resolutely turning the mind's eye in another 
direction than that which it was so miserable a thing for 
you to contemplate ? We all know, of course, how some, 
when the mind grew into that persistent habit of looking 
in only one direction, of harbouring only one wretched 
thought, which is of the essence of madness, have thought, 
as they could not turn away the mind's eye at will, to blind- 
fold the mind (so to speak) altogether : to make sure 
that it should see nothing at all. By opium, by strong 
drink, men have endeavoured to reduce the mind to pure 
stupefaction, as their sole chance of peace. And you 
know too, kindly reader, that even such means have 
sometimes failed of their sorrowful purpose ; and that 
men have madly flung off the burden of this life, as 
though thus they could fling off the burden of self and 
of remembrance. 

I have said that it would be an unspeakable blessing 
if we could as easily turn the eyes away from a moral as 
from a physical pigsty ; and in my belief we may, to a 
great degree, train ourselves to such a habit. You see, 
from what I have just said, that I do not think the thing 
is always or entirely to be done. The only way to for- 
get a thing is to cease to feel any interest in it ; and we 
cannot cheat ourselves into the belief that we feel no 
interest in a thing which we intensely desire to forget. 
But though the painful thing do not, at our will, quite 
die away into nothing, still we may habituate ourselves 
to look away from it. Only time can make our vexations 
and worries fade into nothing, though we are looking at 
them : even as only distance in space can make the pig- 
sty disappear, if we retire from it still looking in its 
direction. But we may turn our back on the pigsty, and 



312 CONCERNING THE WORRIES OF LIFE, 

so cease to behold it though it be close at hand. And in 
like manner, we may get our mind so under control, that 
in ordinary cases it will answer the rein. We may 
acquire, by long-continued effort, the power to turn our 
back upon the worry — that is, in unmetaphoric lan- 
guage, to think of something else. 

I have often occasion to converse with poor people 
about their little worries, their cares and trials ; and 
from the ingenious way in which they put them, so as to 
make them look their very worst, it is sometimes easy to 
see that the poor man or woman has been brooding for long 
hours over the painful thing, turning it in all different 
ways, till the thing has been got into that precise point of 
view in which it looks its very ugliest. It is like one of 
those gutta-percha heads, squeezed into its most hideous 
grin. And I have thought, how long this poor soul must 
have persisted in looking at nothing but this dreary pros- 
pect before finding out so accurately the spot whence it 
looks most dreary. I might mention one or two amus- 
ing instances ; but I do not think it would be fair to give 
the facts, and I could not invent any parallel cases unless 
by being myself painfully worried. And we all know 
that, apart from other reasons, it is impolitic to look 
too long at a disagreeable object, for this reason — that 
all subjects, pleasing or painful, greaten on our view if 
we look at them long. They grow much bigger. You 
can hardly write a sermon (writing it as carefully and 
well as you can) without being persuaded before you 
have done with it, that the doctrine or duty you are 
seeking to enforce is one of the very highest possible 
importance. You feel this incomparably more strongly 
when you have finished your discourse than you did when 
you began it. So with an essay or an ai'ticle. Half 



AND HOW TO MEET THEM. 313 

in jest, you choose your subject ; half earnestly, you 
sketched out your plan ; but as you carefully write it 
out, it begins to grow upon you that it would be well for 
the human race would it but listen to your advice and 
act upon it. It is so also with our worries, so with all the 
ills of our lot, so especially with any treachery or injus- 
tice with which we may have been treated. You may 
brood over a little worry till, like the prophet's cloud, it 
passes from being of tho size of a man's hand into some- 
thing that blackens all the sky, from the horizon to the 
zenith. You may dwell upon the cruelty and treachery 
with which you have been used, till the thought of them 
stings you almost to madness. Who but must feel for 
the abandoned wife, treated unquestionably with scan- 
dalous barbarity, who broods over her wrongs till she 
can think of nothing else, and can hardly speak or write 
without attacking her unworthy husband ? You may, in 
a moral sense, look at the pigsty or the open sewer till, 
wherever you look, you shall see nothing save open sew- 
ers and pigsties. You may dwell so long on your own 
care and sorrow, that you shall see only care and sorrow 
everywhere. Now, don't give in to that if you can help 
it. 

Some one has used you ill — cheated you, misrepre- 
sented you. An ugly old woman, partially deaf, and with 
a remarkably husky voice, has come to your house with- 
out any invitation, and notwithstanding the most frigid 
reception which civility will permit, persists in staying 
for ten days. You overhear Mr. Snarling informing a 
stranger that your essays in Fraser are mainly character- 
ized by conceit and ill-nature (Mr. Snarling, put on the 
cap). Your wife and you enter a drawing-room to make 
a forenoon visit. Miss Limejuice is staying at the house. 



314 CONCERNING THE WORRIES OF LIFE, 

Your friend, Mr. Smith, drove you down in his drag, 
which is a remarkably handsome turn-out. And entering 
the drawing-room somewhat faster than was expected, 
you surprise Miss Limejuice, still with a malignant grin on 
her extraordinarily ugly countenance, telegraphing across 
the room to the lady of the house to come and look at the 
carriage. In an instant the malignant grin is exchanged 
for a fawning smile, but not so quickly but that you saw 
the malignant grin. A man has gone to law with you 
about a point which appears to you perfectly clear. 
Now, don't sit down and think over and over again these 
petty provocations. Exclude them from your mind. 
Most of them are really too contemptible to be thought 
of. The noble machinery of your mind, though you be 
only a commonplace good-hearted mortal, was made for 
something better than to grind that wretched grist. And 
as for greater injuries, don't think of them more than you 
can help. You will make yourself miserable. You will 
think the man who cheated or misrepresented you an in- 
carnate demon, while probably he is in the main not so 
bad, though possessed of an unhappy disposition to tell 
lies to the prejudice of his acquaintance. Remember 
that if you could see his conduct, and your own conduct, 
from his point of view, you might see that there is much 
to be said even for him. No matter how wrong a man 
is, he may be able to persuade himself into the honest 
belief that he is in the right. You may kill an apostle, 
and think you are doing God service. You may vilify a 
curate, who is more popular than yourself; and in the 
process of vilification, you may quote much Scripture and 
shed many tears. Very, very few offenders see their 
offence in the precise light in which you do while you 
condemn it. So resolve that in any complicated case, in 



AND now TO MEET THEM. 315 

which misapprehension is possible ; in all cases in wliich 
you cannot convict a man of direct falsehood ; you shall 
give him credit for honesty of intention. And as to all 
these petty offences which have been named — as to most 
petty mortifications and disappointments — why, turn 
your back on them. Turn away from the contemplation 
of Mr. Snarling's criticism as you would turn away from 
a little stagnant puddle to look at fairer sights. Look in 
the opposite direction from all Miss Limejuice's doings 
and sayings, as you would look in the opposite direction 
from the sole untidy corner of the garden, where the rot- 
ten pea-sticks are. As for the graver, sorrow, try and 
think of it no more. Learn its lesson indeed ; God sent 
it to teach you something and to train you somehow ; but 
then try and think of it no more. 

But there are mortals who are always raking up 
unpleasant subjects, because they have a real delight in 
them. Like the morbid anatomist, they would rather 
look at a diseased body than a healthy one. Well, in the 
case of their own lot, let such be indulged. At first, 
when you find them every time you see them, beginning 
again the tedious story of all their discomforts and wor- 
ries, you are disposed to pity them, tedious and uninter- 
esting though the story of their slights and grievances 
be. Do not throw away pity upon such. They are not 
suitable objects of charity. They have a real though 
perverted enjoyment in going over that weary narration. 
It makes them happy to tell at length how miserable they 
are. They would rather look at the pigsty than not. 
Let them. It is all quite right. But unhappily such 
people, not content themselves to contemplate pigsties, 
generally are anxious to get their acquaintances to con- 
template their pigsties too ; and as their acquaintances, in 



316 CONCERNING THE WORRIES OF LIFE, 

most instances, would rather look at a clover-field than a 
pigsty, such people become companions of the most dis- 
agreeable sort. As you are sitting on a fine summer even- 
ing on the grass before your door, tranquil, content, full 
of thankful enjoyment, they are fond (so to speak) of sud- 
denly bringing in a scavenger's cart, and placing it before 
you, where it will blot out all the pleasant prospect. 
They will not let you forget the silly thing you said or 
did, the painful passage in your life on which you wish 
to shut down the leaf for ever. They are always prob- 
ing the half-healed wound, sticking the knife into the 
sensitive place. If the view in a hundred directions is 
beautiful, they will, by instant affinity and necessity of 
nature, beg you to look at the dunghill, and place the 
dunghill before you for that purpose. I believe there are 
many able, sensitive men, who never had a fair chance 
in life. Their powers have been crippled, their views 
embittered, their whole nature soured, by a constant dis- 
cipline of petty whips and scourges, and little pricking 
needles, applied (in some cases through pure stolidity 
and coarseness of nature) by an ill-mated wife. It is 
only by flying from their own fireside that they can 
escape the unceasing gadfly, with its petty, irritating, 
never-ending sting. They live in an atmosphere of pig- 
sty. They cannot lift their eyes but some ugly, petty, 
contemptible wrong is sure to be crammed upon their 
aching gaze. And it must be a very sweet and noble 
nature that years of this training will not embitter. It 
must be a very great mind that years of this training will 
fail to render inconceivably petty and little. Oh ! woful 
and miserable to meet a man of fifty or sixty, an educated 
man, who in this world of great interests and solemn an- 
ticipations, can find no subjects to talk of but the neglect 



AND HOW TO MEET THEM. 317 

of his wealthy neighbour, the extortionate price he is 
charged for sugar, the carelessness of his man-servant, 
the flirtations of his maid-servants, the stiffness of Lord 
Dunderhead when he lately met that empty-pated peer. 
In what a petty world such a man lives ! Under what 
a low sky he walks : how muggy the atmosphere he 
breathes ! 

You remember Mr. Croaker, in Goldsmith's Goodna- 
lured Man. Whenever he saw a number of people cheer- 
ful and happy, he always contrived to throw a chill and 
damp over the circle by wishing, with a ghastly air, that 
they might all be as well that day six months. I have 
known many Croakers. I have known men who, if they 
saw a young fellow quite happy in his lot and his work, 
hopeful and hearty, would instantly try to suggest some- 
thing that might make him unhappy ; that might pull 
him down to a congenial gloom. I have known persons 
who, if they had looked upon a gay circle of sweet, lively 
girls, rosy and smiling, would have enjoyed extremely to 
have (in a moral sense) suddenly brought into that fair 
circle a hearse and a coffin. And I have been filled with 
fiery indignation, when I knew that such persons, really 
acting from malignant spite and bitterness to see others 
happy, would probably have claimed to be acting from 
religious motives, and doing a Christian duty. The very 
foundation, and primary axiom, in some men's religious 
belief, is, that Almighty God is spitefully angry to see 
His creatures happy. Oh what a wicked, mischievous 
lie ! God is love. And we know it on the highest of 
all authorities, that the very first and grandest duty He 
claims of His creatures, is to love Him with heart and 
soul and strength and mind ; not to shrink before Him, 
like whipped slaves before a capricious, sulky tyrant ; but 



318 CONCERNIXG THE WORRIES OF LIFE, 

to love Him and trust to Him as loving children might 
gather at the kindest parent's knee. I am content to look 
at a pigsty when needful : God intends that we should 
oftentimes look at such in the moral world ; but God 
intends that we should look at clover-fields and fra- 
grant flowers whenever we can do so without a derelic- 
tion of duty. I am quite sure that when the Blessed 
Redeemer went to the marriage at Cana of Galilee, he 
did not think it his duty to cast a gloom and a damp over 
the festive company there. Do not misunderstand me, 
my spiteful acquaintance. There is a time to mourn, as 
well as a time to dance ; and in this life we shall have 
quite enough of the former time, without seeking for su- 
pererogatory woes. I am not afraid, myself, to look upon 
the recent grave ; I would train my children to sit upon 
the daisied mound, pensive, but not afraid, as I told 
them that Christianity has turned the sepulchrum into the 
KOLfj.i]Tfiptov, — the burying-place into the sleeping-place ; 
as I told them how the Christian dead do but sleep for 
the Great Awaking. But I should not think it right to 
break in upon their innocent cheer by rushing in and 
telling them that their coffin would soon be coming, and 
that their grave was waiting in the churchyard. There 
are times enough and events enough which will tell them 
that. Don't let us have Mr. Croaker. And don't let us 
fancy that by making ourselves miserable, we are doing 
something pleasing to God. It is not His purpose that 
we should look at pigsties when we can honestly help it. 
No doubt, the erroneous belief that God wishes that we 
should, runs through all religions. India, Persia, Ara- 
bia, have known it, no less than Rome, England, Scot- 
land ; the fakir, the eremite, the monk, the Covenanter, 
have erred together here. The Church of England, and 



AND HOW TO MEET THEM. 319 

the Church of Scotland, are no more free from the ten- 
dency to it, than the Churcli of Rome ; and the grim 
Puritan, who thought it sinful to smile, was just as far 
wrong as the starved monastic and the fleshless Brahmin. 
Every now and then, I preach a sermon against this 
notion ; not that people now-a-days will actually scourge 
and starve themselves ; but that they carry with them an 
inveterate belief that it would be a fine thing if they 
did. Here is the conclusion of the last sermon ; various 
friendly readers of Fraser have sent me fancy specimens 
of bits of my discourses ; let them compare their notion 
of them with the fact : — 

It shows how all men, ever^'where, have been pressed by a com- 
mon sense of guilt against God, which they thought to expiate by 
self-inflicted punishment. But we, my fi'iends, know better than that. 
Jesus died for us ; Jesus sutl'ered for us ; His sufferings took away our 
sins, our own sufferings, how great soever, never could; Christ's 
sacrifice was all-sufficient; and any penance on our part is just as 
needless as it would be unavailing. Take, then, brethren, without a 
scruple or a misgiving, the innocent enjoyment of life. Let your 
heart beat, gladly and thankfully, by your quiet fireside ; and never 
dream that there is anything of sinful self-indulgence in that pure 
delight with which you watch your children's sports, and hear their 
prattle. Look out upon green spring fields and blossoms, upon sum- 
mer woods and streams ; gladden in the bright sunshine, as well as 
muse in the softening twilight; and never fancy that though these 
things cheer you amid the many cares of life, you are falling short of 
the ideal sketched by that kindly Teacher of self-denial who said, ' If 
any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his 
cross daily ! ' 

Having relieved my feelings by thus stating my reso- 
lute protest against what I think one of the most mis- 
chievous and wicked errors I ever knew, I proceed to 
say that although I think nothing can be more foolish 
than to be always looking at moral pigsties, still the prin- 
ciple cannot be laid down without some restriction. You 



320 CONCERNING THE WORRIES OF LIFE, 

may, by indulging the disposition to look away from un- 
pleasant prospects, bring your mind to a morbid state : 
you may become so over-sensitive, that you shall shrink 
away from the very thought of injustice, cruelty, or suf- 
fering. I do not suppose selfishness. I am not talking 
to selfish, heartless persons, who can look on with entire 
composure at suffering of any sort, provided it do not 
touch themselves. I am quite content that such should 
endure all that may befal them, and more. The heart of 
some men is like an extremely tough beef-steak, which 
needs an immense deal of beating before it will grow ten- 
der. The analogy does not hold entirely ; for I believe 
the very toughest steak may be beaten till it grows ten- 
der ; or at least the beating will not make it tougher. 
Whereas the human heart is such, that while in generous 
natures it learns, by sufi^ering, to feel for the suffering of 
others, in selfish and sordid natures it becomes only the 
more selfish and self-contained the more it is called to 
feel. But I am not speaking to selfish persons. I am 
thinking of generous, sensitive human beings, to whom 
the contemplation of injustice and cruelty and falsehood 
is as painful when these are pressing upon others, as 
when they are pressing upon themselves. I am thinking 
of men and women who feel their hearts quicken and 
their cheeks flush when they read the stupid and unjust 
verdicts of occasional (must I say frequent?) juries ; and 
the preposterous decisions of London police magistrates 
now and then. To such, I well believe, the daily read- 
in "• of the law report in the Times is a painful worry ; it 
sets before one so sad a picture of human sin and folly ; 
and it shows so strongly that human laws labour most 
vainly to redress the greater part of the evils that press 
on human life. You remember how once Byron, at Ven- 



AND HOW TO MEET THEM. 321 

ice, durst not open the Quarterly Review ; and sent it 
away after it had been several days in his house, igno- 
rant even whether it contained any notice of him. Of 
course this was a purely selfish shrinking ; the poet knew 
that his nature would so wince under the dreaded attack, 
that he was afraid even to ascertain whether there were 
any attack at all. Have not you, my reader, from a 
morbid though more generous sensitiveness, sometimes 
shrunk from opening the newspaper which day by day 
reported some iniquitous court-martial, some scandalous 
trial in the Ecclesiastical Court, revealing human deprav- 
ity in its foulest manifestation, and setting out and press- 
ing upon your view evils which were practically remedi- 
less ? And so, thinking of such things, I \vish to qualify 
my great principle, that in the moral world it is wise and 
right to turn your back upon the pigsty, where practicable. 
I have thought of two limitations of this principle. The 
first limitation is this ; that however painful it may be to 
look at unpleasant things, we ought fairly to face them 
so long as there is any hope of remedying them. The 
second limitation is this ; that however painful it may be 
to look at unpleasant things, we ought not to train our- 
selves, by constantly refusing to look at them, to a mor- 
bidly shrinking habit of mind. Such a habit, by indul- 
gence, will grow upon us to that degree, that it will unfit 
us for the rude wear of life. And the moral nature, 
grown sensitive as the mimosa, will serve as a conductor 
to convey many a wretched and debilitating pang to the 
heart. 

Let us think of these two limitations of my theory as 
to the fiishion in which the worries of life should be met. 

Though it is wise, generally speaking, to look away 
from painful sights, it is not wise or right to do so while, 
21 



322 CONCERNING THE WORRIES OF LIFE, 

by facing them, we may hope to mend them. It is not 
good, like a certain priest and Levite of ancient times, 
to turn our back on the poor man lying half dead by the 
way-side ; while it is still possible for a Good Samaritan 
to pour in oil and wine. However unpleasing the sight, 
however painful the effort, let us look fairly at the worry 
in our lot, till we have done our best to put it right. 
It is not the act of wisdom, it is the doing of indolence, 
selfishness, and cowardice, to turn our back on that 
which we may remedy or even alleviate by facing it. 
It is only when no good can come of brooding over the 
pigsty that I counsel the reader persistently to turn away 
from it. Many men try to forget some family vexa- 
tion, some neglected duty, some social or political griev- 
ance, when they ought manfully to look full at it, to see 
it in its true dimensions and colours, and to try to mend 
matters. They cannot truly forget the painful fact. 
Even when it is not distinctly remembered, a vague, 
dull, unhappy sense of something amiss will go with 
them everywhere — all the more unhappy because con- 
science will tell them they are doing wrong. It is so in 
small matters as well as great. Your bookcase is all in 
confusion ; the papers in your drawers have got into a 
sad mess. It is easier, you think, to shut the doors, to 
lock the drawers, to go away and think of something 
else, than manfully to face the pigsty and sort it up. 
Possibly you may do so. If you are a nerveless, cow- 
ardly being, you will ; but you will not be comfortable 
though you have turned your back on the pigsty : a 
gnawing consciousness of the pigsty's existence will go 
with you wherever you go. Say your affairs have be- 
come embarrassed ; you are living beyond your means ; 
you are afraid to add up your accounts and ascertain 



AND HOW TO MEET THEM. 323 

how you stand. Ah, mj friend, many a poor nnan well 
knows the feeling ! Don't give in to it. Fairly face 
the fact : know the worst. INIany a starving widow and 
orphan, many a pinched family reduced from opulence 
to sordid shifts, have suffered because the dead father 
would not while he lived face the truth in regard to his 
means and affairs ! Let not that seltish being quote my 
essay in support of the course he takes. However com- 
plicated and miserable the state of the facts may be — 
though the pigsty should be like the Augean stable — 
look fairly at it ; see it in its length and breadth ; cut 
off your dinner-parties, sell your horses, kick out the 
fellows who make a hotel of your house and an ordinary 
of your table ; bring your establishment to what your 
means can reach, to what will leave enough to insure 
your life. Don't let your miserable children have to 
think bitterly of you in your grave. And another re- 
spect in which you ought to carry out the same reso- 
lute purpose to look the pigsty full in the face is, in 
regard to your religious views and belief. Don't turn 
your back upon your doctrinal doubts and difficulties. 
Go up to them and examine them. Perhaps the 
ghastly object which looks to you in the twilight like a 
sheeted ghost, may prove to be no more than a table- 
cloth hanging upon a hedge ; but if you were to pass it 
distantly without ascertaining what it is, you might carry 
the shuddering belief that you had seen a disembodied 
spirit all your days. Some people (very wrongly, as I 
think) would have you turn the key upon your sceptical 
difficulties, and look away from the pigsty altogether. 
From a stupid though prevalent delusion as to the mean- 
ing of Faith, they have a vague impression that the 
less ground you have for your belief, and the more 



324 CONCERNING THE WORRIES OF LIFE, 

objections you stoutly refuse to see, the more faith you 
have got. It is a poor theory, that of some worthy 
divines ; it amounts to just this : Christianity is true, 
and it is proved true by evidence ; but for any sake don't 
examine the evidence, for the more you examine it the 
less hkely you are to believe it. I say, No ! Let us 
see your difficulties and objections ; only to define them 
will cut them down to half their present vague, misty 
dimensions. I am not afraid of them ; for though, after 
all is said, they continue to be difficulties, I shall show 
you that difficulties a hundredfold greater stand in the 
way of the contrary belief; and it is just by weighing 
'Opposing difficulties that you can in this world come to 
any belief, scientific, historical, moral, political. Let me 
say here that I heartily despise the man who professes 
a vague scepticism on the strength of difficulties which 
he has never taken the pains fairly to measure. It is 
hypocritical pretence when a man professes at the same 
instant to turn his back upon a prospect, and to be 
guided by what he discerns in that prospect. But there 
are men who would like to combine black with white, 
yes with no. There are men who are always anxious 
to combine the contradictory enterprises. How to do a 
iKing and How at the same time not to do it. 

In brief, my Hmitation is this: Do not refuse to 
admit distressing thoughts, if any good is to come of 
admitting them ; do not turn your back on the ugly 
prospect, so long as there is a hope of mending it ; don't 
be like the wrecked sailor, who drinks himself into in- 
sensibility, while a hope of rescue remains ; don't refuse 
to worry yourself by thinking what is to become of your 
children after you are gone, if there be still time to 
devise some means of providing for them. Look fairly 



AND now TO MEET THEM. 325 

at the blackest view, and go at it bravely if there be the 
faintest chance of making it brighter. 

And, in truth, a great many bad things prove to be 
not so bad when you fairly look at them. The day 
seems horribly rainy and stormy when you look out of 
your library-window ; but you wrap up and go out reso- 
lutely for a walk, and the day is not so bad. By the 
time your brisk five miles are finished, you think it 
rather a fine breezy day, healthful though boisterous. 
All remediable evils are made a great deal worse by 
turning your back on them. The skeleton in the closet 
rattles its bare bones abominably, when you lock the 
closet-door. Your disorderly drawer of letters and papers 
was a bugbear for weeks, because you put off sorting it 
and tried to forget it. It made you unhappy — vaguely 
uneasy, as all neglected duties do ; yet you thought the 
trouble of putting it right would be so great that you would 
rather bear the little gnawing uneasiness. At length 
you could stand it no more. You determined some day 
to go at your task and do it. You did it. It was done 
speedily ; it was done easily. You felt a blessed sense 
of relief, and you wondered that you had made such a 
painful worry of a thing so simple. By the make of 
the universe every duty deferred grows in bulk and 
weight and painful pressure. 

It may here be said that when a worry cannot be 
forgotten, and yet cannot be mended, it is a good thing 
to try to define it. Measure its exact size. That is 
sure to make it look smaller. I have great confidence 
in the power of the pen to give most people clearer 
ideas than they would have without it. You have a 
vague sense that in your lot there is a vast number of 
worries and annoyances. Just sit down, take a large 



326 CONCERNING THE WORRIES OF LIFE, 

sheet of paper and a pen, and write out a list of all 
your annoyances and worries. You will be surprised 
to find how few they are, and how small they look. 
And if on another sheet of paper you make a list of 
all the blessings you enjoy, I believe that in most 
cases you will see reason to feel heartily ashamed 
of your previous state of discontent. Even should the 
catalogue of worries not be a brief one, still the killing 
thing — the vague sense of indefinite magnitude and 
number — will be gone. Almost all numbers diminish 
by accurately counting them. A clergyman may hon- 
estly believe that there are five hundred people in his 
church; but unless he be a person accustomed accu- 
rately to estimate numbers, you will find on counting 
that his congregation does not exceed two hundred and 
fifty. When the Chartist petition was presented to Par- 
liament some years ago, it was said to bear the signa- 
tures of five or six millions of people. It looked such 
an immense mass that possibly its promoters were hon- 
est in promulgating that belief But the names were 
counted, and they amounted to no more than a million 
and a half. So, thoughtful reader, who fancy yourself 
torn by a howling pack of worries, count them. You 
will find them much fewer than you had thought ; and 
the only way to satisfactorily count them is by making a 
list of them in writing. 

Yet here there is a difficulty too. The purpose for 
which I advise you to make such a list, is to assure 
yourself that your worries are really not so very many 
or so very great. But there is hardly any means in this 
world which may not be worked to the opposite of the 
contemplated end. And by writing out and dwelling on 
the list of your worries, you may make them worse. 



AND HOW TO MEET THEM. 327 

You may diminish their number, but increase their in- 
tensity. You may set out the relations and tendencies 
of the vexations under which you suffer, of the ill usage 
of which you complain, till you whip yourself up to a 
point of violent indignation. In reading the life of Sir 
Charles Napier, I think one often sees cause to lament 
that the great man so chronicled and dwelt upon the 
petty injustices which he met with from petty men. 
And when a poor governess writes the story of her in- 
dignities, recording them with painful accuracy, and put- 
ting them in the most unpleasing light, one feels that it 
would have been better had she not taken up the pen. 
But indeed these are instances coming under the gen- 
eral principle set out some time since, that irremediable 
worries are for the most part better forgotten. 

So much for the first limitation of my theory for the 
treatment of worries. The second, you remember, is, 
that we ought not to give in to the impulse to turn our 
back upon the ugly prospect to such a degree that any 
painful sight or thought shall be felt hke a mortal stab. 
You may come to that point of morbid sensitiveness. 
And I believe that the greatest evil of an extremely 
retired country life is, that it tends to bring one to that 
painfully shrinking state. You may be afraid to read 
the Times, for the suffering caused you by the contem- 
plation of the irremediable sin and misery of which you 
read the daily record there. You may come to wish 
that you could creep away into some quiet corner, where 
the uproar of human guilt and wretchedness should 
never be heard again. You may come to sympathize 
heartily with the weary aspiration of the Psalmist, ' Oh 
that I had wings like a dove : then would I flee away 
and be at rest ! ' Sometimes as you stand in your sta- 



328 CONCERNING THE WORRIES OF LIFE, 

ble, smoothing down your horse's neck, you may think 
how quiet and silent a place it is, how free from worry, 
and wish you had never to go out of the stall. Or when 
you have been for two or three days ill in bed, the days 
going on and going down so strangely, you may have 
thought that you would stay there for the remainder of 
your life ; that you could not muster resolution to set 
yourself again to the daily worry. You people who can- 
not understand the state of feeling which I am trying to 
describe, be thankful for it : but do not doubt that such 
a state of feeling exists in many minds. 

Let me confess, for myself, that for several years past 
I have been afraid to read a good novel. It is intensely 
painful to contemplate and realize to one's mind the 
state of matters set out in most writings of the class. 
Apart from the question of not caring for that order of 
thought (and to me dissertation is much more interesting 
than narrative), don't you shrink from the sight of strug- 
ghng virtue and triumphant vice, of cruelty, oppression, 
and successful falsehood? Give us the story that has 
no exciting action ; that moves along without incident 
transcending the experience of ordinary human beings ; 
that shows us quiet, simple, innocent modes of life, 
free from the intrusion of the stormy and wicked world 
around. Don't you begin, as you grow older, to sympa- 
thize with that feeling of the poet Beattie, which when 
younger you laughed at, that Shakspeare's admixture of 
the grotesque in his serious plays was absolutely necessary 
to prevent the tragic part from producing an effect too 
painful for endurance ? The poet maintained that Shak- 
speare was aiming to save those who might witness his 
plays from a ' disordered head or a broken heart.' You 
see there, doubtless, the working of a morbid nervous 



AND HOW TO MEET THEM. 329 

system ; but there is a substratum of truth. Once upon 
a time, when a man was worried by the evils of his lot, 
he could hope to escape from them by getting into the 
world of fiction. But now much fiction is such that 
you are worse there than ever. I do not think of the 
grand, romantic, and tremendously melodramatic inci- 
dents which one sometimes finds ; these do not greatly 
pain us, because we feel both characters and incidents to 
be so thoroughly unreal. I do not mind a bit when the 
hero of Monte Christo is flung into the sea in a sack 
from a cliff some hundreds of feet high ; that pains one 
no more than the straits and misfortunes of Munchau- 
sen. The wearing thing is to be carried into homely 
scenes, and shown life-like characters, bearing and strug- 
ghng with the worries of life we know so well. We 
are reminded, only too vividly, of the hard strife of 
reduced gentility to keep up appearances, of the aging, 
life-wearing battle with constant care. It is as much 
wear of heart to look into that picture truthfully set 
before us by a man or woman of genius, as to look at 
the sad reality of this world of struggle, privation, and 
failure. It was just the sight of these that we wished to 
escape, and lo ! there they are again. So one shrinks 
from the sympathetic reading of a story too truthfully 
sad. I once read Vanity Fair. I would not read it 
again on any account, any more than one would wil- 
lingly go through the delirium of a fever, or revive 
distinctly the circumstances of the occasion on which 
one acted like a fool. The story was admirable, incom- 
parable ; but it was too sadly true. We see quite 
enough of that sort of thing in actual life : let us not 
have it again when we seek relief from the realities of 
actual life. Once you get into a sunshiny atmosphere 



330 CONCERNING THE WORRIES OF LIFE, 

when you began to read a work of fiction ; or if the 
light was lurid, it was manifestly the glare of some 
preparation of sulphur in a scene-shifter's hand. But 
now, you are often in a doleful grey from the begin- 
ning of a story to its end. 

It is a great blessing when a man's nature or training 
is such that he is able to turn away entirely from his 
work when he desists from actual working, and to shut 
his eyes to the contemplation of any painful thing when 
its contemplation ceases to be necessary or useful. There 
is much in this of native idiosyncrasy, but a good deal 
may be done by discipline. You may to a certain ex- 
tent acquire the power to throw off from the mind the 
burden that is weighing upon it, at all times except the 
moment during which the burden has actually to be 
borne. I envy the man who stops his work and in- 
stantly forgets it till it is time to begin again. I envy 
the man who can lay down his pen while writing on 
Fome subject that demands all his mental stretch, and 
go out for a walk, and yet not through all his walk be 
wrestling with his subject still. Oh ! if we could lay 
down the mind's load as we can lay down the body's ! 
If the mind could sit dow^n and rest for a breathing 
space, as the body can in climbing a hill ! If, as we 
decidedly stop walking when we cease to walk, we could 
cease thinking when we intend to cease to think ! It 
was doubtless a great secret of the work which Napo- 
leon did with so Httle apparent wear, that he could fall 
asleep whenever he chose. Yet even he could not at 
will look away from the pigsty : no doubt one suddenly 
pressed itself upon his view on that day when he was 
sitting alone at dinner, and in a moment sprang up with 
a furious execration, and kicked over the table, smash- 



AND now TO MEET TIIEM. 331 

iiig his plates as drunken Scotch weavers sometimes do. 
Let us do our best to right the wrong; but when we 
have done our best, and go to something else, let us 
quite forget the wrong : it will do no good to remember 
it now. It is long-continued wear that kills. We can 
do and bear a vast deal if we have blinks of intermis- 
sion of bearing and doing. But the mind of some men 
is on the stretch from the moment they begin a task till 
they end it. Slightly and rapidly as you may run over 
this essay, it w^as never half-an-hour out of the writer's 
waking thoughts from the writing of the first line to the 
writing of the last. I have known those who when busied 
witli any work, legal, literary, theological, parochial, do- 
mestic, hardly ever consciously ceased from it ; but were, 
as Mr. Bailey has expressed it, ' about it, lashing at it day 
and night.' The swell continued though the wind had 
gone down ; the wheels spun round though the steam 
was sliut off. Let me say here (I say it for myself), that 
apart entirely from any consideration of the religious 
sanctions wdiich hallow a certain day of the seven, it 
appears to me that its value is literally and really ines- 
timable to the overworked and worried man, if it be 
kept sacred, not merely from worldly work, but from the 
intrusion of worldly cares and thoughts. The thing can 
be done, my friend. As the last hour of Saturday 
strikes, the burden may fall from the mind : the pack of 
worries may be whipped off; and you may feel that 
you have entered on a purer, freer, happier life, which 
will last for four-and-twenly hours. I am a Scotchman, 
and a Scotch clergyman, and I hold views regarding 
the Sunday with which I know that some of my most 
esteemed readers do not sympathize ; but I believe, for 
myself, that a strict resolution to preserve the Lord's day 



332 CONCERNING THE WORRIES OF LIFE, 

sacred (in no Puritanical sense), would lengthen many a 
valuable life ; would preserve the spring of many a noble 
mind ; would hold off in some cases the approaches of 
imbecility or insanity. 

I do not forget, in urging the expediency of training 
the mind to turn away from worries which it will do no 
good to continue to look at, that anything evil or pain- 
ful has a peculiar power to attract and compel attention 
to it. A little bad thing bulks larger on the mind's view 
than a big good thing. It persistently pushes its ugly 
face upon our notice. You cannot forget that you have 
bad tooth-ache, though it be only one little nerve that is 
in torment, and all the rest of the body is at ease. , And 
some little deformity of person, some little worry in your 
domestic arrangements, keeps always intruding itself, and 
defying you to forget or overlook it. If the pigsty 
already referred to be placed in the middle of the pretty 
lawn before your door, it will blot out all the landscape : 
you will see nothing save the pigsty. Evil has the ad- 
vantage of good in many ways. It not merely detracts 
from good : it neutralizes it all. I think it is Paley who 
says that the evils of life supply no just argument against 
the divine benevolence; inasmuch as when weighed against 
the blessings of life, the latter turn the scale. It is as if 
you gave a man five hundred a-year, and then took away 
from him one hundred : this would amount virtually to giv- 
ing him a clear four hundred a-year. It always struck 
me that the case put is not analogous to the fact. The 
four hundred a-year left would lose no part of their 
marketable value when the one hundred was taken away. 
The fact is rather as if you gave a man a large jug of 
pure water, and then cast into it a few drops of black- 



AND HOW TO MEET THEM. 333 

draught. That little infusion of senna would render the 
entire water nauseous. No doubt there might be fifty 
times as much pure water as vile senna : but the vile 
senna would spoil the whole. Even such is the influence 
of evil in this system of things. It does not simply 
diminish the quantity of good to be enjoyed : to a great 
degree it destroys the enjoyment of the whole of the good. 
Good carries weight in the race with eviL It has not a 
fair start, nor a fair field. Don't you know, reader, that 
it needs careful, constant training to give a child a good 
education; and possibly you may not succeed in giving 
the good education after all : while no care at all suffices 
to give a bad education ; and a bad education is generally 
successful. So in the physical world. No field runs to 
wheat. If a farmer wants a crop of good grain, he must 
work hard to get it. But he has only to neglect his field 
and do nothing, and he will have weeds enough. The 
"whole system of things in this world tends in favour of evil 
rather than of good. But happily, my friend, we know 
the reason why. And we know that a day is coming 
which will set these things right. 

I trust I have made sufficiently plain the precise error 
against which this essay is directed. The thing with 
which I find fault is that querulous, discontented, un- 
happy disposition which sits down and broods over disa- 
greeables and worries : not with the view of mending 
them, nor of bracing the moral nature by the sight of 
them : but simply for the sake of harping upon that te- 
dious string; — of making yourself miserable, and making 
all who come near you miserable too. There are people 
into whose houses you cannot go, without being sickened 
by the long catalogue of all their slights and worries. It is 
a wretched and contemptible thing to be always hawking 



334 CONCERNING THE WORRIES OF LIFE, 

about one's griefs, in the hope of exciting commiseration. 
Let people be assured that their best friends will grow 
wearied of hearing of their worries : let people be as- 
sured that the pity which is accorded them will be in 
most cases mingled with something of contempt. There 
are men and women who have a wonderful scent for a 
grievance. If you are showing them your garden, and 
there be one untidy corner, they will go straight to that, 
and point it out with mournful elation, and forget all 
the rest of the trim expanse. If there be one mortify- 
ing circumstance in an otherwise successful and happy 
lot, they will be always reminding you of that. You 
write a book. Twenty favourable reviews of it appear, 
and two unfavourable : Mr. Snarling arrives after break- 
fast, sure as fate, with the two unfavourable reviews in 
his pocket. You are cheerful and contented with your 
lot and your house : Mr. Snarling never misses an oppor- 
tunity of pointing out to you the dulness of your situation, 
the inconvenience of your dwelling, the inferiority of the 
place you hold in life to what you might a priori have an- 
ticipated. You are quite light-hearted when Mr. Snarling 
enters ; but when he goes, you cannot help feeling a good 
deal depressed. The blackest side of things has been 
pressed on your notice during his stay. I do not think this 
is entirely the result of malice. It is ignorance of the 
right way to face little worries. The man has got a habit 
of looking only at the dunghill. Would that he could 
learn better sense ! 

Let me here remark a certain confusion which exists in 
the minds of many. I have known persons who prided 
themselves on their ability to inflict pain on others. They 
thought it a proof of power. And no doubt to scarify a man 
as Luther and Milton did, as Croker, Lockhart, and Macau- 



AND HOW TO MEET THEM. 335 

lay did, is a proof of power. But sometimes people inflict 
pain on others simply by making themselves disgusting ; 
and to do tiiis is no proof of power. No doubt you may 
severely pain a refined and cultivated man or woman by 
revolting vulgarity of language and manner. You may, 
Mrs. Bouncer, embitter your poor governess's life by your 
coarse, petty tyranny ; and you may infuriate your ser- 
vants by talking at them before strangers at table. But 
let me remind you that there is a dignified and an undig- 
nified way of inflicting pain. There are what may be 
called the Active and the Passive ways. You may inflict 
annoyance as a viper does ; or you may inflict annoyance 
as a dunghill does. Some men (sharp critics belong to 
this class) are like the viper. They actively give pain. 
Y"ou are afraid of them. Others, again, are like a dung- 
bill. They are merely passively offensive. Y'ou are dis- 
gusted at these. Now the viperish man may perhaps be 
proud of his power of stinging : but the dunghill man has 
no reason earthly to be proud of his power of stinking. 
It is just that he is an offensive object, and men would 
rather get out of his way. Y^'et I have heard a blockhead 
boast how he had driven away a refined gentleman from 
a certain club. No doubt he did. The gentleman 
could never go there without the blockhead offensively 
revolting him. The blockhead told the story with pride. 
Other blockheads listened, and expressed their admira- 
tion of his cleverness. I looked in the blockhead's face, 
and inwardly said, Oh you human dunghill ! Think of 
a filthy sewer boasting, ' Ah, I can drive most people 
away from me ! ' 

To the dunghill class many men belong. Such, gen- 
erally, are those who will never heartily say anything 
pleasant; but who are always ready to drop hints of what 



336 CONCERNING THE WORRIES OF LIFE, 

they think will be disagreeable for you to hear. Such 
are the men who will walk round your garden, when you 
show it to them in the innocent pride of your heart : and 
after having accomplished the circuit, will shrug their 
shoulders, snufF the air, and say nothing. Such are the 
men who will call upon an old gentleman, and incidentally 
mention that they were present the other Sunday when 
his son preached his first sermon, but say no kindly word 
as to the figure made by the youthful divine. Such are 
the men who, when you show them your fine new church, 
will walk round it hurriedly, say carelessly, ' Very nice ; ' 
and begin to talk earnestly upon topics not connected 
with ecclesiastical architecture. And such, as a general 
rule, are all the envious race, who will never cordially 
praise anything done by others, and who turn green with 
envy and jealousy if they even hear others speak of a 
third party in words of cordial praise. Such men are for 
the most part under-bred, and always of third or fourth- 
rate talent. A really able man heartily speaks well of 
the talent that rivals or eclipses his own. He does so 
through the necessity of a noble and magnanimous nature. 
And a gentleman will generally do as much, through the 
influence of a training which makes the best of the best 
features in the character of man. It warms one's heart 
to hear a great and illustrious author speak of a young 
one who is struggling up the slope. But it is a sorry 
thing to hear Mr. Snarling upon the same subject. 

I have sometines wondered whether what is commonly 
called coolness in human beings is the result of a remark- 
able power of looking away from things which it is not 
thought desirable to see ; or of a still more remarkable 
power of looking at disagreeable things and not minding. 



AND now TO MEET THEM. 337 

You remember somewhere in the Life of Sir Walter 
Scott, we are told of a certain joyous dinner-party at his 
house in Castle-street. Of all the gay party there was 
none so gay as a certain West Country baronet. Yet in 
his pocket he had a letter containing a challenge which 
he had accepted ; and next morning early he was off 
to the duel in which he was killed. Now, there must 
have been a woful worry gnawing at the clever man's 
heart, you would say. How did he take it so coolly ? 
Did he really forget for the time the risk that lay before 
him ? Or did he look fairly at it, yet not care ? He was 
a kind-hearted man as well as a brave one : surely he 
must have been able, through the jovial evening, to look 
quite away from the possibility of a distracted widow, 
and young children left fatherless. Sometimes this cool- 
ness appears in base and sordid forms : it is then the re- 
sult of obtuseness of nature, — of pure lack of discern- 
ment and feeling. People thus qualified are able with 
entire cbmposure to do things which others could not do 
to save their lives. Such are the people who constitute 
a class which is an insufferable nuisance of civilized soci- 
ety, — the class of uninvited and unwelcome guests. I 
am thinking of people who will without any invitation 
push themselves and their baggage into the house of a 
man who is almost a stranger to them ; and in spite of 
the studied presentation of the cold shoulder, and in spite 
of every civil hint that their presence is most unwelcome, 
make themselves quite at home for so long as it suits them 
to remain. I have heard of people who would come, to 
the number of three or four, to the house of a poor gen- 
tleman to whom every shilling was a consideration ; and 
without invitation remain for four, six, ten weeks at 
a stretch. I have heard of people who would not only 

22 



338 CONCERNING THE WORRIES OF LIFE, 

come uninvited to stay at a small house, but bring with 
them some ugly individual whom its host had never seen : 
and possibly a mangy dog in addition. And such folk 
will with great freedom drink the wine, little used by that 
plain household, and hospitably press the ugly individual 
to drink it freely too. I declare there is something that 
approaches the sublime in the intensity of such folk's 
stolidity. They ivill not see that they are not wanted. 
They jauntily make themselves quite at home. If they 
get so many weeks' board and lodging, they don't care 
how unpleasantly it is given. They will write for your 
carriage to meet them at the railway station, as if they 
were ordering a hackney-coach. This subject, however, 
is too large to be taken up here : it must have an entire 
essay to itself But probably my reader will agree with 
me in thinking that people may possess in an excessive 
degree the valuable power of looking away from what 
they don't wish to see. 

And yet — and yet — do you not feel that it is merely 
by turning our mind's eye away from many thoughts 
which are only too intrusive, that you can hope to enjoy 
much peace or quiet in such a world as this ? How could 
you feel any relish for the comforts of your own cheerful 
lot if you did not forget the wretchedness, anxiety, and 
want which enter into the pinched and poverty-stricken 
lot of others ? You do not like, when you lay yourself 
down at night on your quiet bed, to think of the poor 
wretch in the condemned cell of the town five miles oiF, 
who will meet his violent death to-morrow in the dismal 
drizzling dawn. Some, I verily believe, will not sympa- 
thize with the feeling. There are persons, I believe, who 
could go on quite comfortably with their dinner with a 



AND HOW TO MEET THEM. 339 

starving beggar standing outside tlie window and watch- 
ing each morsel they ate with famished eyes. Perhaps 
there are some who would enjoy their dinner all the bet- 
ter ; and to that class would belong (if indeed he be not 
a pure, dense, unmitigated, unimprovable blockhead, who 
did not understand or feel the force of what he said) that 
man who lately preached a sermon in which he stated 
that a great part of the happiness of heaven would con- 
sist in looking down complacently on the torments of hell, 
and enjoying tlie contrast ! What an idea must that man 
have had of the vile, heartless selfishness of a soul in 
bliss I No. For myself, though holding humbly all that 
the Church believes and the Bible teaches, I say that if 
there be a mystery hard of explanation, it is how the happy 
spirit can be ha[)py even lliere, though missing from its 
side those who in this life were dearest. You remember 
the subHrae prayer of Aquinas — a prayer for Satan him- 
self. You remember the gush of kindliness which made 
Burns express a like sorrow even for the dark Father of 
Evil : ' I'm wae to think upon your den, Even for your 
sake ! ' No. The day may come when it will not grieve 
us to contemplate misery which is intolerable and irreme- 
diable ; but this will be because we shall then have gained 
such clear and right views of all things, that we shall see 
things as they appear to God, and then doubtless see that 
all He does is right. But we may be well assured that 
it will not be the selfish satisfaction of contrasting our 
own happiness with that misery which will enable us to 
contem})late it with complacency : it will be a humble 
submission of our own will to the One Will that is always 
wise and right. Yet you remember, reader, how one 
of the profoundest and acutest of living theologians is fain 
to have recourse, in the case of this saddest of all sad 



340 CONCERNING THE WORRIES OF LIFE, 

thoughts, to the same relief which I have counselled for 
life's little worries — oh how little when we think of this ! 
Archbishop Whatelj, in treating of this great difficulty, 
suggests the idea that in a higher state the soul may have 
the power of as decidedly turning the thoughts away from 
a painful subject as we now have of turning the eyes 
away from a disagreeable sight. 

I thought of these things this afternoon in a gay and 
stirring scene. It was a frozen lake of considerable ex- 
tent, lying in a beautiful valley, at the foot of a majestic 
hill. The lake was covered with people, all in a state of 
high enjoyment : scores of skaters were flying about, and 
there was a roaring of curling-stones like the distant 
thunder that was heard by Rip van Winkle. The sky 
was blue and sunshiny ; the air crisp and clear ; the 
cliffs, slopes, and fields around were fair with untrodden 
snow ; but still one could not quite exclude the recollec- 
tion that this brisk frost, so bracing and exhilarating to 
us, is the cause of great suffering to multitudes. The 
frost causes most outdoor work to cease. No building, 
no fieldwork, can go forward, and so the frost cuts off the 
bread from many hungry mouths ; and tireless rooms and 
thin garments are no defence against this bitter chill. 
Well, you would never be cheerful at all but for the 
blessed gift of occasional forgetfulness ! Those who have 
seen things too accurately as they are, have always been 
sorrowful even when unsoured men. Here, you man 
(one of six or seven eager parties with chairs and gim- 
lets), put on my skates. Don't bore that hole in the heel 
of the boot too deep ; you may penetrate to something 
more sensitive than leather. Screw in ; buckle the 
straps, but not too tight : and now we are on our feet. 



AXD now TO IVrEET THEM. 341 

with the delightful sense of freedom to fly about in any 
direction with almost the smooth swiftness of a bird. 
Come, my friend, let us be off round the lake, with long 
strokes, steadily, and not too fast. We may not be quite 
like Sidney's Arcadian shepherd-boy, piping as if he 
never would grow old ; yet let us be like kindly skaters, 
forgetting, in the exhilarating exercise that quickens the 
pulse and flushes the cheek, that there are such things as 
evil and worry in this world ! 



CHAPTER V. 



CONCERNING GIVING UP AND COMING DOWN. 




OT so very much depends upon a beginning 
after all. The inexperienced writer racks his 
brain for something striking to set out with. 
He is anxious to make a good impression at 
first. He fancies that unless you hook your reader by 
your first sentence, your reader will break away ; making 
up his mind that what you have got to say is not worth 
the reading. Now it cannot be doubted that a preacher, 
who is desirous of keeping his congregation in that dead 
silence and fixedness of attention which one sometimes 
sees in church, must, as a general rule, produce that audi- 
ble hush by his first sentence if he is to produce it at all. 
If people in church are permitted for even one minute at 
the beginning of the sermon to settle themselves, bodily 
and mentally, into the attitude of inattention, and of think- 
ing of something other than the preacher's words the 
preacher will hardly catch them up again. He will 
hardly, by any amount of earnestness, eloquence, point- 
edness, or oddity, gain that universal and sympathetic 
interest of which he fiung away his chance by some long, 
involved, indirect, and dull sentence at starting. But the 
writer is not tried by so exacting a standard. Most 
readers will glance over the first few pages of a book 
before throwing it aside as stupid. The writer may 



CONCERNING GIVING UP AND COMING DOWN. 343 

overcome the evil effect of a first sentence, or even a 
first paragraph, which may have been awkward, ugly, 
dull — yea silly. I could name several very popular 
works which set out in a most unpromising way. I par- 
ticularly dislike the first sentence of Adam Bede, but it is 
redeemed by hundreds of noble ones. It is not certain 
that the express train which is to devour the four hun- 
dred miles between London and Edinburgh in ten hours, 
shall run its first hundred yards much faster than the 
lagging parliamentary. There can be no question that 
the man whom all first visitants of the House of Commons 
are most eager to see and hear is Mr. Disraeli. He is 
the lord of debate ; not unrivalled perhaps, but certainly 
unsurpassed. Yet everybody knows he made a very 
poor beginning. In short, my reader, if something that 
is really good is to follow, a bad outset may be excused. 

One readily believes what one wishes to believe ; and 
I wish to hold by this principle. For I have accumu- 
lated many thoughts Concerning Giving Up and Coming 
Down ; and I have got them lying upon this table, noted 
down on six long slips of paper. I vainly fancy that I 
have certain true and useful things to say ; but I have 
experienced extraordinary difiiculty in deciding how I 
should begin to say them. I have sat this morning by the 
fireside for an hour, looking intently at the glowing coals ; 
but though I could think of many things to say about the 
middle of my essay, I could think of nothing satisfac- 
tory with which to begin it. But comfort came as the 
thought gradually developed itself, that it really mat- 
tered very little how the essay might be begun, provided 
it went on ; and, above all, ended. A dull beginning will 
probably be excused to the essayist more readily than to 
the writer whose sole purpose is to amuse. The essayist 



844 CONCERNING GIVING UP 

pleases himself with the belief that his readers are by 
several degrees more intelligent and thoughtful than the 
ordinary readers of ordinary novels ; and that many of 
them, if they find thoughts which are just and practical, 
will regard as a secondary matter the order in which 
these thoughts come. The sheep's head of northern 
cookery has not, at the first glance, an attractive aspect : 
nor is the nutriment it affords very symmetrically ar- 
ranged : but still, as Dr. John Brown has beautifully 
remarked, it supplies a deal o? fine confused feeding. I 
look at my six pieces of paper, closely written over in a 
very small hand. They seem to me as the sheep's head. 
There is feeding there, albeit somewhat confused. It 
matters not much where we shall begin. Come, my 
friendly reader, and partake of the homely fare. 

The great lesson which the wise and true man is 
learning through life, is, how to come down without 
GIVING UP. Reckless and foolish people confuse these 
two things. It is far easier to give up than to come 
down, it is far less repugnant to our natural self-conceit. 
It befits much better our natural laziness. It enables us 
to fancy ourselves heroic, when in truth we are vain, 
slothful, and fretful. I have not words to express my 
belief on this matter so strongly as I feel it. Oh ! I ven- 
erate the man who with a heart unsoured has come 
down, and come down far, but who never will give up ! 

I fancy my reader wondering at my excitement, and 
doubtful of my meaning. Let me explain my terras. 
What is meant by giving up : what by coming down ? 

By coming down I understand this: Learning from 
the many mortifications, disappointments, and rebuffs 
which we must all meet as we go on through life, to 
think more humbly of ourselves, intellectually, morally, 



AND COlNriNG DOWN. 345 

socially, physically, cesthetically : yet, while thinking 
thus humbly of ourselves and our powers, to resolve that 
we shall continue to do our very best : and all this with 
a kindly heart and a contented mind. Such is my ideal 
of true and Christian coming down : and I regard as a 
true hero the man who does it rightly. It is a noble 
thing for a man to say to himself, ' I am not at all what 
T had vainly fancied myself: my mark is far, very far low- 
er than I thought it had been : I had fancied myself a 
great genius, but I find I am only a man of decent ability : 
I had fancied myself a man of great weight in the county, 
but I find I have very little influence indeed : I had fan- 
cied that my stature was six feet four, but I find that I 
am only five feet two : I had fancied that in such a com- 
petition I never could be beaten, but in truth I have been 
sadly beaten : I had fancied [suffer me, reader, the sol- 
emn allusion] that my Master had entrusted me with ten 
talents, but T find I have no more than one. But I will 
accept the humble level which is mine by right, and with 
God's help I will do my very best there. I will not kick 
dogs nor curse servants : I will not try to detract from 
the standing of men who are cleverer, more eminent, or 
taller than myself: I will heartily wish them well. I 
will not grow soured, moping, and misanthropic. I know 
I am beaten and disappointed, but I will hold on manfully 
still, and never give up ! ' Such, kindly reader, is Chris- 
tian coming down ! 

And what is giving up ? Of course, you understand 
my meaning now. Giving up means that when you are 
beaten and disappointed, and made to understand that 
your mark is lower than you had fancied, you will throw 
down your arms in despair, and resolve that you will tiy 
no more. As for you, brave man, if }'0U don't get all you 



346 CONCERNING GIVING UP 

want, you are resolved you shall have nothing. If you 
are not accepted as the cleverest and greatest man, you 
are resolved you shall be no man at ail. And while the 
other is Christian coming down, this is un-Christian, fool- 
ish, and wicked giving up. No doubt, it is an extremely 
natural thing. It is the first and readiest impulse of the 
undisciplined heart. It is in human nature to say, ' If I 
don't have all the pudding, I shall have none.' The 
grand way of expressing the same sentiment is, Aut Gce- 
sar aut nyJlus. Of course, the Latin words stir the youth- 
ful heart. You sympathize with them, I know, my reader 
under five-and-twenty. You will see through them some 
day. They are just the heroic way of saying, I shall 
give up, but I never shall come down ! They state a 
sentiment for babies, boys, and girls, not for reasonable 
women and men. For babies, I say. Let me relate a 
parable. Yesterday I went into a cottage, where a child 
of two years old sat upon his mother's knee. The little 
man had in his hand a large slice of bread and butter 
which his mother had just given him. By words not in- 
telligible to me, he conveyed to his mother the fact that 
he desired that jam should be spread upon the slice of 
bread and butter. But his mother informed him that 
bread and butter must suffice, without the further luxury. 
The young human being (how thoroughly human) con- 
sidered for a moment ; and then dashed the bread and 
butter to the further end of the room. There it was : Aut 
Ccesar aut nullus ! The baby would give up, but it 
would not come down ! Alexander the Great, look at 
yourself! Marius among the ruins of Carthage, what do 
you think you look like here ? By the time the youthful 
reader comes to understand that Byron's dark, mysterious 
heroes, however brilliantly set forth, are in conception 



AND COMING DOWN. 347 

sim|)ly childish ; by the time he is able to appreciate 
Philip Van Artevelde (I mean Mr. Henry Taylor's no- 
ble tragedy) ; he will discern that various things which 
look heroic at the first glance, will not work in the long 
run. And that practical principle is irrational which will 
not work. And that sentiment which is irrational is not 
heroic. The truly heroic thing to say, as well as the ra- 
tional thing, is this : If I don't get all the pudding, I shall 
be content if I get what I deserve, or what God sends. 
If I am not Gcesar, there is no need that I should be 
nullus : I shall be content to be the highly respectable 
Mr. Smith. Though I am not equal to Shakspeare, I 
may write a good play. Though inferior to Bishop Wil- 
berforce, I shall yet do my best to be a good preacher. 
It is a fine thing, a noble thing, as it appears to me, for a 
man to be content to labour hard and do his utmost, 
though well aware that the result will be no more than 
decent mediocrity, after all. It is a finer thing, and more 
truly heroic, to do your very best and only be second-rate, 
than even to resolve, like the man in the Iliad, — 

" 'Aiev upLGTivecv, Kal vnecpoxov efiixevai uAAwv." 

There is a strain put upon the moral nature in contentedly 
and perseveringly doing this, greater than is put upon the 
intellectual by the successful effort to be best. And what 
would become of the world if all men went upon Homer's 
principle ; and rather than come down from its sublime 
elevation, would fling down their tools and give up? 
Shall I, because I cannot preach like Mr. INIelvill, cease 
to write sermons ? Or shall I, because I cannot counsel 
and charm like the author of Friends in Council, cease to 
write essays ? You may rely upon it I shall not. I do 
not forget who said, in words of praise concerning one 



348 CONCERNING GIVING UP 

who had done what was absolutely but very little, * She 
hath done what she could ! ' And what would become of 
me and my essays, if the reader, turning to them from 
the pages of Hazlitt or Charles Lamb, should say, 'I 
shall not come down ; and if I find I have to do so I shall 
give up? ' What if the reader refused to accept the plain 
bread and butter which I can furnish, unless it should be 
accompanied by that jam which I am not able to add ? 

Giving up, then, is the doing of mortified self-conceit, 
of sulky pettishness, of impatience, of recklessness, of des- 
peration. It says virtually to the great Disposer of 
events, ' Every thing in this world must go exactly as I 
wish it, or I shall sit down and die.' It is of the nature 
of a moral strike. But coming down generally means 
coming to juster and sounder views of one's self and one's 
own importance and usefulness ; and if you come down 
gracefully, genially, and Christianly you work on dili- 
gently and cheerfully at that lower level. No doubt, to 
come down is a tremendous trial ; it is a sore mortifica- 
tion. But trials and mortifications, my reader, are useful 
things for you and me. The hasty man, when obliged to 
come down, is ready to conclude that he may as well give 
up. In some matters it is a harder thing to go the one 
mile and stop at the end of it, than to go the twain. It 
is much more difiicult to stop decidedly half-way down a 
very steep descent, than to go all the way. If you are 
beaten in some competition, it is much easier to resolve 
recklessly that you will never try again, than to set man- 
fully to work, with humble views of yourself, and try 
once more. Wisdom comes down : folly gives up. Wis- 
dom, I say, comes down ; for I think there can be little 
doubt that most men, in order to think rightly of them- 
selves, must come to think much more humbly of them- 



AND COjMING down. 349 

selves than they are naturally disposed to do. Few men 
estimate themselves too lowly. Even people who lack 
confidence in themselves are not without a great measure 
of latent self-esteem ; and, indeed, it is natural enough 
that men should rate themselves too high, till experience 
compels them to come down. I am talking of even sen- 
sible and worthy men. They know they have worked 
hard ; they know that what they have done has cost them 
great pains ; they look with instinctive partiality at the 
results they have accomplished ; they are sure these re- 
sults are good, and they do not know hoiv good till they 
learn by comparative trial. But when the comparative 
trial comes, there are few who do not meet their match — 
few who do not find it needful to come down. Perhaps 
even Shakspeare felt he must come down a little when 
he looked into one or two of Christopher Marlowe's plays. 
Clever boys at school, and clever lads at college, natu- 
rally think their own little circle of the cleverest boys or 
lads to contain some of the cleverest fellows in the world. 
They know how well they can do many things, and how 
hard they have worked to do them so well. Of course, 
they will have to come down, after longer experience of 
life. It is not that the set who ranked first among their 
young companions are not clever fellows ; but the world 
is wide and its population is big, and they will fall in with 
cleverer fellows still. It is not that the head boy does 
not write Greek iambics well, but it wdll go hard but 
somewhere he will find some one who will write them 
better. They are rare exceptions in the race of mankind 
who, however good they may be, and however admirably 
they may do some one thing, will not some day meet their 
match — meet their superior, and so have painfully to 
come down. And, so far as my own experience lias 



350 CONCERNING GIVING UP 

gone, I have found that the very, very few, who never meet 
a taking down, who are first at school, then first at college, 
then first in life, seem by God's appointment to have 
been so happily framed that they could do without it ; 
that to think justly of themselves they did not need to 
come down ; that their modesty and humility equalled 
their merit ; and that (though not unconscious of their 
powers and their success) they remained, amid the in- 
cense of applause which would have intoxicated others, 
unaffected, genial, and unspoiled. 

People who lead a quiet country life amid their own 
belongings, seeing little of those of bigger men, insensibly 
form so excessive an estimate of their personal posses- 
sions as lays them open to the risk of many disagreeable 
takings down. You, solitary scholar in the country par- 
sonage, have lived for six months among your books till 
you have come to fancy them quite a great library. But 
you pay a visit to some wealthy man of literary tastes. 
You see his fine editions, his gorgeous bindings, his 
carved oak book-cases ; and when you return home you 
will have to contend with a temptation to be disgusted 
with your own little collection of books. Now, if you 
are a wise man, you will come down, but you wont give 
up ; you will admit to yourself that your library is not 
quite what you had grown to think it, but you will hold 
that it is a fair library after all. When you go and see 
the grand acres of evergreens at some fine country house, 
do not return mortified at the prospect of your own little 
shrubbery which looked so fine in the morning before 
you set out. When you have beheld Mr. Smith's fine 
thoroughbreds, resist the impulse to whack your own 
poor steed. Rather pat the poor thing's neck : gracefully 
come down. It was a fine thing, Cato, banished from 



AND COiMING DOAVN. 351 

Rome, yet having his httle senate at Utica. He had 
been compelled to come down, indeed, but he clung to 
the dear old institution ; he would not give up. I have 
enjoyed the spectacle of a lady, brought up in a noble 
baronial dwelling, living in a pretty little parsonage, and 
quite pleased and happy there ; not sulking, not fretting, 
not talking like an idiot of ' what she had been accus- 
tomed to,' but heartily reconciling herself to simpler 
things — coming down, in short, but never dreaming of 
giving up. So have I esteemed the clergyman like Syd- 
ney Smith, who had commanded the attention of crowded 
congregations of educated folk, of gentlemen and gentle- 
women, yet who works faithfully and cheerfully in a 
rural parish, and prepares his sermons diligently, with 
the honest desire to make them interesting and instruc- 
tive to a handful of simple country people. Of course, 
he knows that he has come down, but he does not dream 
of giving up. 

There is in human nature a curious tendency to think 
that if you are obliged to fall, or if you have fallen, a 
good deal, you may just as well go all the way ; and it 
would be hard to reckon the amount of misery and ruin 
which have resulted from this mistaken fancy, that if you 
have come down, you may give up at once. A poor 
man, possibly under some temptation that does not come 
once in ten years, gets tipsy ; walking along in that state 
he meets the parish clergyman ; the clergyman's eye rests 
on him in sorrow and reproach. The poor man is heart- 
ily ashamed ; he is brought to a point at which he may 
turn the right w^ay or the wrong way. He has not read 
this essay, and he takes the wrong. He thinks he has 
been so bad, he cannot be worse. He goes home and 
thrashes his wife ; he ceases attending church ; he takes 



352 CONCERNING GIVING UP 

his children from school : he begins to go to destruction. 
All this founds on his erroneously imagining that you 
cannot come down without giving up. But I believe that, 
in truth, as the general rule, the fatal and shameful deed 
on which a man must look back in bitterness, and sorrow 
all his life, was done after the point at which he grew 
reckless. It was because he had given up that he took 
the final desperate step ; he did not give up because he 
had taken it. The man did a really desperate deed be- 
cause he thought wrongly that he had done a desperate 
deed already, and could not now be any worse ; and sad 
as are intellectual and social coming down, and likely to 
result in giving up as these are, they are not half so sad 
nor half so perilous as moral coming down. It must in- 
deed be a miserable thing for man or woman to feel that 
they have done something which will shame all after life 
— something which will never let them hold up their 
head again, something which will make them (to use the 
expressive language of Scripture) ' go softly all their 
days.' Well, let such come down ; let them learn to be 
humble and penitent ; but for any sake don't let them 
give up ! That is the great Tempter's last and worst 
suggestion. His suggestion to the fallen man or woman 
is. You are now so bad that you cannot be worse — you 
had better give up at once ; and Judas listened to it and 
went and hanged himself; and the poor Magdalen, fallen 
far, but with a deep abyss beneath her yet, steals at mid- 
night, to the dark arch and the dark river, with the bitter 
desperate resolution of Hood's exquisite poem, ' Any- 
where, anywhere, out of the world ! ' I remember an 
amusing exemplification of the natural tendency to think 
that having come down you must give up, in a play in 
which I once saw Keeley, in my play-going days. He 



AND COMING DOWN. 353 

fancied that he had (unintentionally) killed a man : his 
horror was extreme. Soon after, by another mischance, 
he killed (as he is led to believe) another man : his hor- 
ror is redonbled ; but now there mingles with it a reckless 
desperation. Having done such dreadful things, he con- 
cludes that he cannot be worse, whatever he may do. 
Having come so far down, he thinks he may as well give 
up ; and so the little fat man exclaims, with a fiendish 
laugh, 'Now I think I had better kill somebody else !' 
Ah, how true to nature! The plump desperado was at 
the moment beyond remembering that the sound view of 
the case was, that if he had done so much mischief it was 
the more incumbent on him to do no more. The poor lad 
in a counting-house who wellnigh breaks his mother's 
heart by taking a little money not his own, need not break 
it outright by going entirely to ruin. Rather gather your- 
self up from your tall. Though the sky-scraping spars are 
gone, we may rig a jury mast : — 

' And from the wreck, far scattered o'er the rocks, 
Build us a little bark of hope once more.' 

We are being taught all through life to come down in 
our anticipations, our self-estimation, our ambition. We 
aim high at first. Children expect to be kings, or at least 
to be always eating plum pudding and drinking cream. 
Clever boys expect to be great and famous men. They 
come gradually to soberer views and hopes. Our vanity 
and self-love and romance are cut in upon day by day : 
step by step we come down, but, if we are wise, we never 
give up. We hold on steadfastly still ; we try to do our 
best. The painful discipline begins early. The other 
day I was at our sewing-school. A very little girl came 
up with great pride to show me her work. It was very 



354 CONCERNING GIVING UP 

badly done, poor little thing. I tried to put the fact as 
kindly as possible ; but of course I was obliged to say that 
the sewing was not quite so good as she would be able to 
do some day. I saw the eyes fill and the lips quiver : 
there were mortification and disappointment in the little 
heart. I saw the temptation to be petted, to throw the 
work aside — to give up. But better thoughts prevailed. 
She felt she must come down. She went away silently 
to her place and patiently tried to do better. Ah, thought 
T to myself, there is a lesson for you. 

Let me now think of intellectual giving up and com- 
ing down. 

T do not suppose that a thorough blockhead can ever 
know the pain of intellectual coming down. From his 
first schooldays he has been made to understand that he 
is a blockhead, and he does not think of entering him- 
self to run against clever men. A large dray-horse is 
saved the mortification of being beaten for the Derby ; 
for he does not propose to run for the Derby. The 
pain of intellectual coming down is felt by the really 
clever man, who is made to feel that he is not so clever 
as he had imagined ; that whereas he had fancied him- 
self a first-class man, he is no more than a third-class 
-one; or ^ that, even though he be a man of good ability, 
and capable of doing his own work well, there are 
others who can do it much better than he. You would 
not like, my clever reader, to be told that not much is 
expected of you ; that no one supposes that you can 
write, ride, w^alk, or leap like Smith. There was some- 
thing that touched one in that letter which Mr. R. H. 
Home wrote to the I'imes, explaining how he was going 
away to Australia because his poetry was neglected and 
unappreciated. What slow, painful years of coming 



AND COMING DOWN. 355 

down the poet must have gone through before he thus 
resolved to give up. I never read Orion; and living 
among simple people, I never knew any one who had 
read the work. It may be a Avork of great genius. But 
the poet insisted on giving up when, perhaps, the right 
thing for him was to have come down. Perhaps he 
over-estimated himself and his poetry ; perhaps it met 
all the notice it deserved. 

The poet stated, in his published letter, that his writ- 
ings had been most favourably received by high-class 
critics ; but he was going away because the public 
treated him with entire neglect. Nobody read him, or 
cared for him, or talked about him. 'And what did 
the learned world say to your paradoxes ? ' asked good 
Dr. Primrose ; but his son's reply was, ' The learned 
Morld said nothing at all to my paradoxes.' Such ap- 
pears to have been the case with Mr. Home ; and so he 
grew misanthropic, and shook from his feet the dust of 
Britain. He gave up, in short ; but he refused to come 
down. And no doubt it is easier to go off to the wilder- 
ness at once than to conclude that you are only a mid- 
dling man after having long regarded yourself as a great 
genius. It must be a sad thing for an actor who came 
out as a new Kean, to gradually make up his mind that 
he is just a respectable, painstaking person, who never 
will draw crowds and take the town by storm. Many 
struggles must the poor barrister know before he comes 
down from trying for the great seal, and aims at beino- 
a police magistrate. So with the painter ; and you 
remember how poor Haydon refused to come down, 
and desperately gave up. It cannot be denied that, to 
the man of real talent, it is a most painful trial to intel- 
lectually come down ; and that trial is attended with a 



356 CONCERNING GIVING UP 

Strong temptation to give up. Really clever men not 
unfrequently have a quite preposterous estimate of their 
own abilities ; and many takings down are needful to 
drive them out of that. And men who are essentially 
middling men intellectually, sometimes have first-class 
ambition along with third-rate powers ; and these coming 
together make a most ill-matched pair of legs, which 
bear a human being very awkwardly along his path in 
life, and expose him to numberless mortifications. It is 
hard to feel any deep sympathy for such men, though 
their sufferings must be great. And, unhappily, such 
men, when compelled to come down, not unfrequently 
attempt by malicious arts to pull down to their own level 
those to whose level they are unable to rise. I have 
sometimes fancied one could almost see the venomous 
vapours coming visibly from the mouth of a malignant, 
commonplace, ambitious man, when talking of one more 
able and more successful than himself. 

Possibly social coming down is even more painful 
than intellectual. It is very sad to see, as we some- 
times do, the father of a family die, and his children in 
consequence lose their grade in society. I do not mean, 
merely to have to move to a smaller house, and put 
down their carriage ; for all that may be while social 
position remains unchanged. I mean, drop out of the 
acquaintance of their father's friends ; fall into the soci- 
ety of coarse, inferior people ; be addressed on a footing 
of equality by persons with whom they have no feelings 
or thoughts in common ; be compelled to sordid shifts 
and menial work and frowsy chambers. Threadbare 
carpets and rickety chairs often indicate privation as 
extreme as shoeless feet and a coat out at elbows. We 
might probably smile at people who felt the painfulness 



AND COMING DOWN. 357 

of coming down, because obliged to pass from one set to 
another in the society of some little country town, where 
the second circle is not unfrequently (to a stranger's 
view) very superior to the first in appearance, manners, 
and means. But there is one line which it must cost a 
parent real anguish to make up his mind that his chil- 
dren are to fall below after having been brought up 
above it : I mean the one essentially impassable line of 
society — the line which parts the educated, well-bred 
gentleman from the man who is not such. There is 
something terrible about that giving up. And how such 
as have ever known it, cling to the upper side of the 
line of demarcation. We have all seen how people 
work and pinch and screw to maintain a decent appear- 
ance before the world, while things were bare and scanty 
enough at home. And it is an honest and commendable 
pride that makes the poor widow, of small means but 
with the training and feeling of a lady, determine never 
to give up the notion that her daughters shall be ladies 
too. It need not be said that such a determination is 
not at all inconsistent with the most stringent economy 
or the most resolute industry on her own or her girls' 
part. I did not sympathize with a letter w4iich S. G. O. 
lately published in the Times, in which he urged that 
people with no more than three hundred a-year, should 
at once resolve to send their daughters out as menial 
servants, instead of fighting for the position of ladies for 
them. I thought, and I think, that tliat letter showed 
less than its author's usual genial feeling, less than his 
usual sound sense. Kind and judicious men will prob- 
ably believe that a good man's or woman's resistance to 
social coming down, and especially to social giving up, is 
deserving of all respect and sympathy. A poor clergy- 



358 CONCERNING GIVING UP 

man, or a poor military man, may have no more than 
three hundred a-year ; but I heartily venerate his en- 
deavours to preserve his girls from the society of the ser- 
vants' hall and the delicate attentions of Jeames. The 
world may yet think differently, and manual or menial 
work may be recognized as not involving social giving 
up ; but meanwhile the step is a vast one, between the 
poorest governess and the plumpest housemaid. 

A painful form of social coming down falls to the lot 
of many women when they get married. I suppose 
young girls generally have in their mind a glorified ideal 
of the husband whom they are to find ; wonderfully 
handsome, wonderfully clever, very kind and affection- 
ate, probably very rich and famous. Sad pressure must 
be put upon a worthy woman's heart before she can 
resolve to give up all romantic fancies, and marry purely 
for money. There must be sad pressure before a young 
girl can so far come down as to resolve to marry some 
man who is an old and ugly fool. Yet how many do ! 
No doubt, reader, you have sometimes seen couples who 
were paired, but not matched ; a beautiful young crea- 
ture tied to a foul old satyr. "Was not your reflection, 
as you looked at the poor wife's face, ' Ah ! how 
wretchedly you must have come down.' And even 
when the husband is really a good old man, you cannot 
but think how different he is from the fair ideal of a 
girl's first fancy. Before making up her mind to such a 
partner as that, the young woman had a good deal to 
give up. And probably men, if of an imaginative turn, 
have, when they get married, to come down a good deal 
too. I do not suppose any thing about the clever man's 
wife but what is very good ; but surely, she is not 
always the sympathetic, admiring companion of his early 



AND COMING DOWN. 359 

visions. Think of the great author, walking in the sum- 
mer fields, and saying to his wife, as he looked at the 
frisking lambs, that they seemed so innocent and happy 
that he did not wonder that in all ages the lamb has 
been taken as the emblem of happine,ss and innocence. 
Think of the revulsion in his mind \ihfen the thoughtful 
lady replied, after some reflection, ' Yes, lamb is very 
nice, especially with mint sauce ! ' The great man had 
no doubt already come down very much in his expecta- 
tion of finding in his wife a sympathetic companion ; 
but after that, he would probably give up altogether. 
Still, it is possibly less painful for a clever man to find, 
as years go on, and life sobers into the prosaic, that he 
must come down sadly in his ideas of the happiness of 
wedded life, than it is for such a man fairly to give up 
before marriage, making up his mind that in that mat- 
ter, as in most others, men must be content with what 
they can get, though it be very inferior to what they 
could wish. I feel a great disgust for what may be 
called sentimentality ; in practical life sentimental peo- 
ple, and people who talk sentimentally, are invariably 
fools ; still it appears to me that there is sober truth in 
the following lines, which I remember to have read 
somewhere or other, though the truth be somewhat sickly 
and sentimentally expressed : — 

' And as the dove, to far Palmyra flying, 

From where lier native founts of Antioch gleam 
Weary, exhausted, longing, panting, sighing, 
Lights sadly at the desert's bitter stream; 

' So many a soul, o'er life's drear desert faring, — 

Love's pure, congenial spring unfound, unquafled, — 
Suffers, recoils, then, thirsty and despairing 
Of what it would, descends and sips the nearest draught.' 



360 CONCERNING GIVING UP 

Most people find it painful to come down in the mat- 
ter of growing old. Most men and women cling, as 
long as may be, to the belief that they are still quite 
young, or at least not so very old. Let us respect the 
clinging to youth : there seems to me much that is good 
in it. It is an unconscious testimony to the depth and 
universality of the conviction that, as time goes on, we 
are leaving behind us the more guileless, innocent, and 
impressionable season of our life. We feel little sym- 
pathy, indeed, for the silly old woman who affects the 
airs and graces of a girl of seventeen : who makes her 
daughters attire themselves like children when they are 
quite grown up ; and who renders herself ridiculous in 
low dresses and a capless head when her head is half 
bald and her shoulders like an uncooked plucked fowl. 
That is downright offensive and revolting. And to see 
such an individual surrounded by a circle of young lads 
to whom she is talking in a buoyant and flirting manner, 
is as melancholy an exhibition of human folly as can 
anywhere be seen. But it is quite a different thing 
when man or woman, thoughtful, earnest, and pious, sits 
down and muses at the sight of the first gray hairs. 
Here is the slight shadow, we think, of a certain great 
event which is to come ; here is the earliest touch of a 
chill hand which must prevail at length. Here is man- 
ifest decay ; we have begun to die. And no worthy 
human being will pretend that this is other than a very 
solemn thought. And we look back as well as forward : 
how short a time since we were little children, and kind 
hands smoothed down the locks now growing scanty and 
gray ! You cannot recognize in the glass, when you 
see the careworn, anxious face, the smooth features of 
the careless child. You feel you must come down ; you 



AND COMING DOWN. 361 

are young no more ! Yet you know by what shifts 
people seek in this respect to avoid coming down. We 
postpone, year after year, the point at which people 
cease to be young. We are pleased when we find peo- 
ple talking of men above thirty as young men. Once, 
indeed. Sir Robert Peel spoke of Lord Derby at forty- 
five as a man in " the buoyancy of youth." Many men 
of five-and-forty would feel a secret elation as they read 
the words thus employed. The present writer wants a 
good deal yet of being half-way ; yet he remembers 
how much obliged he felt to Mr. Dickens for describing 
Tom Pinch, in Martin ChuzzUwit (in an advertisement 
to be put in the Times), as ' a respectable young man, 
aged thirty-five.' You remember how Sir Bulwer Lyt- 
ton, as he has himself grown older, has made the heroes 
of his novels grow older pari passu. Many years ago 
his romantic heroes were lads of twenty ; now they are 
always sentimental men of fifty. And in all this we 
can trace a natural conviction of the intellect, as well 
as the natural disinclination in any respect to come down. 
For youth, with all its folly, is by common consent re- 
garded as a better thing than age, with all its experi- 
ence : and thus to grow old is regarded as coming down. 
And there is something very touching, something to be 
respected and sympathized with by all people in the 
vigour of life, in the fashion in which men who have 
come down so far as to admit that they have grown old, 
refuse to give up by admitting that they are past their 
work ; and, indeed, persist in maintaining, after fifty 
years in the church or thirty on the bench, that they 
are as strong as ever. Let us reverence the old man. 
Let us help him in his determination not to give up. 
Let us lighten his burden when we can do so, and then 



362 CONCERNING GIVING UP 

give him credit for bearing it all himself. If there be 
one respect in which it is especially interesting and 
respectable when a man refuses to give up at any price, 
and indeed is most unwilling to come down, it is in 
regard of useful, honest labor in the service of God and 
man. Sometimes the unwillingness to come down in 
any degree is amusing, and almost provoking. I re- 
member once, coming down a long flight of steps from 
a railway station, I saw a venerable dignitary of the 
church, who had served it for more than sixty years, 
coming down with difficulty, and clinging to the railing. 
Now, what I ought to have done was, to remain out of 
his view, and see that he got safely down without mak- 
ing him aware that I was watching him. But I hastily 
went up to him and begged him to take my arm, as the 
stair was so slippery and steep. I think I see the indig- 
nation of the good man's look. ' I assure you,' he 
replied, 'my friend, I am quite as able to walk down 
the steps alone as you are ! ' 

Apart from the more dignified regrets which accompany 
the coming down of growing old, there are petty mortifi- 
cations which vain people will feel as they are obliged to 
come down in their views as to their personal appearance. 
As a man's hair falls off, as he grows unwieldily stout, as 
he comes to blow like a porpoise in ascending a hill, as 
his voice cracks when he tries to sing, he is obliged step 
by step to come down. I heartily despise the contemp- 
tible creature who refuses to come down when nature bids 
him : who dyes his hair and his moustache, rouges his 
face, wears stays, and pads out his chest. Yet more dis- 
gusting is the made-up old rei)robate when, padded, rouged, 
and dyed, as already said, he mingles in a circle of fast 
young men, and disgusts even them by the foul pruriency 



AND COMING DOWN. 363 

of his talk. Kick him out, muscular Christian! Tell 
him what you think of him, and see how the despicable 
wretch w^ill cower ! But while this refusing to come 
gracefully down as to physical aspect with advancing 
time is thoroughly abominable, let it be remembered that 
even in this matter the judicious man will not give up, 
though he will come down. Don't grow slovenly and 
careless as you grow old. Be scrupulously neat and tidy 
in dress. It is a pleasant sight — pleasant like the trimly 
raked field of autumn — the speckless, trim, wdiite neck- 
clothed, well-dressed old man. 

That we may w^isely come down, we need frequently 
to be reminded that we ought to do so. We need, in fact, 
a good many takings down as we go on through life, or we 
should all become insufferable. I speak of ordinary men. 
The old vanity keeps growing up ; and like the grass of 
a lawn, it needs to be often mown down ; and however 
frequently and closely it is mown, there will always (as 
with the lawn) be quite enough of it. You meet with 
some wholesome, mortifying lesson ; you feel you must 
come down ; and you do. You think humbly and reason- 
ably of yourself for a while. But the grass is growing 
again : your self-estimation is getting up again ; you are 
beginning to think yourself very clever, great, and emi- 
nent, when some rude shock undeceives you. You are 
roughly compelled to think of yourself more meekly. 
You find that in the general judgment you are no great 
author, artist, actor, cricket-player, shot, essay writer, 
preacher. You are so mortified that you think you may 
at once give up ; but, after deliberating, you resolve that 
you will only come down. 

Great men have no doubt given up ; but it was either 
in some time of morbid depression, or when it was really 



364 CONCERNING GIVING UP 

unavoidable that thej should do so. Pitt gave up when 
on his dying-bed he heard of several great victories of the 
First Napoleon ; and, crying out with his blackening lips, 
* Roll up the map of Europe,' turned his face to the wall 
and never spoke more. Sir Robert Peel gave up, when 
he tendered to the queen his final resignation of office. 
When the queen asked him if there was nothing he could 
wish her to do in testimony of her regard for him, his 
answer was — ' Only that your majesty would never call 
me to your counsels again ! ' What a giving up for that 
ambitious man ! Notwithstanding what has already been 
said in this essay, I am not, on reflection, sure that Mari- 
us had given up, or even come down, when he sat, in his 
lowest depression of fortune, amid the ruins of Carthage. 
Gelimer had finally given up when he was carried as a 
captive in the Roman triumph, looking with a smile upon 
all the pomp of the grand procession, and often exclaim- 
ing, ' Vanity, vanity : all is vanity ! ' But Diocletian, 
busy among his cabbages, interested and content though 
the purple had been flung aside, had neither given up 
nor come down. Nor had Charles V. done either in 
that beautiful retreat which Mr. Stirling has so grace- 
fully described. There was no coming down there, 
in the loss of self-estimation ; there was no giving up, 
in the bitter and despairing sense, when the greatest 
monarch of the great sixteenth century, in his greatest 
eminence, calmly laid down the cares of royalty, that in his 
last days he might enjoy quiet, and have space in which 
to prepare for the other world. It was only that ' the 
royal eagle would rest his weary wings.' 

But we have all known very small men who were 
always ready to give up, rather than that their silly vanity 
should be mortified by any degree of coming down. We 



AND COMING DOWN. 365 

have all known cases highly analogous to that of the lit- 
tle child who threw away his bread and butter, because 
he could not have jelly too. I dare say, my reader, you 
may have seen a man who if he were not allowed to be 
the first man in some little company, the only talker, the 
only singer, the only philosopher, or the only jack-pud- 
ding, would give up, and sit entirely silent. In his own 
small way, he must be aut Ccesar aut nullus. A rival 
talker, singer, or mountebank, turns him pale with envy 
and wrath. Of course, all this founds on extreme pet- 
tiness of character, co-existing with inordinate vanity 
and silliness. And it is an offence which is its own se- 
vere punishment. The petty sin whips itself with a sting- 
ing scourge of pack-thread. 

I have sometimes thought that it is a remarkable thing, 
how very quickly human beings can quite give up. An 
entire revolution may pass in a few hours, perhaps in a few 
minutes, upon our whole estimate of things. I should 
judge that a soldier, charging some perilous position in a 
delirium of excitement, and fancying military glory the 
sublimest thing in hfe ; if he suddenly be disabled by 
some ghastly wound, and is borne away to the rear deadly 
sick, fevered, and wrung with agony, would give up 
many notions which he had cherished before. But I have 
been especially struck by witnessing how fast men can 
resign themselves to the last and largest giving up : how 
quickly they can make up their mind that they are dying, 
and that all will be over in two or three hours. A man 
stricken with cholera at morning, and gone before night, 
has not the feeling that his death is sudden. When 
eternity comes very near, this world and all its concerns 
are speedily discerned as little more than shadows. We 
give up quickly, and with little effort, all those things and 



366 CONCERNING GIVING UP 

fancies and opinions to which we cknig very closely in 
health and life. The dying man feels that to hiin these 
are not. A Christian man, busy in the morning at his 
usual work, and smitten down at midday by some fatal 
disease or accident, could be quite resigned to die at 
evening. He may have had a hundred plans in his mind 
at daybreak : but it would cost him little effort to give 
them all up. And but for the dear ones he must 
leave behind, a very short time would suffice to resign 
a pious man to the Nunc dimittis. We grow accus- 
tomed, wonderfully fast, to the most new and surprising 
things. 

But returning to matters less solemn, let me sum up 
what has been said so far, by repeating my grand princi- 
ple, that in most cases the wise and good man will come 
down, but never give up. The heroic thing to say is this : 
Things are bad, but they may be w^orse ; and with God's 
blessing I shall try to make them better. Who does not 
know that by resolute adherence to this principle, many 
battles have been won after they had been lost ? Don't the 
French say that the English have conquered on many 
fields because they did not know when they had been 
beaten ; in short, because they would never give up ? 
Pluck is a great quality. Let us respect it everywhere ; 
at least, wherever enlisted on the side of right. Ugly is 
the bull-dog, and indeed blackguard-looking : but I ad- 
mire one thing about it: it will never give up. And 
splendid success has often come at length to the man who 
fought on through failure, hoping against hope. Mr. 
Disraeli might well have given up after his first speech 
in the House of Commons : many men would never have 
opened their lips there again. I declare I feel something 
sublime in that defiant llie day icill come when you will 



AND COMING DOWN. 367 

he glad to hear rne, when we read it by the light of 
after events. Of course, only extraordinary success 
could justify the words. They miglit have been the 
vapouring of a conceited fool. Galileo, compelled to 
appear to come down, did not give up : Still it moves. 
The great nonconformist preacher, Robert Hall, ftiirly 
broke down in his first attempt to preach ; but he did not 
give up. Mr. Tennyson might have given up, had he 
been disheartened by the sharp reviews of his earliest vol- 
ume. George Stephenson might also have given up, when 
his railway and his locomotive were laughed out of the 
parliamentary committee. Mr. Thackeray might have 
given up, when the publishers refused to have anything to 
do with Vanity Fair. The first articles of men who have 
become most successful periodical writers, have been 
consigned to the Balaam-box. Possibly this was in some 
measure the cause of their success. It taught them to 
take more pains. It was a taking down. It showed 
them that their task was not so easy : if they would suc- 
ceed, they must do their very best. And if they had 
stamina to resolve that though taken down they would 
not give up, the early disappointment was an excellent 
discipline. I have known students at college whose suc- 
cess in carrying off honors was unexampled, who in their 
first one or two competitions were ignominiously beaten. 
Some would have given up. They only came down : 
then they went at their work with a will ; and never 
were beaten more. 

The man who is most likely to give up, is the man 
who foolishly refuses to come down. Every human 
being (excepting men like Shakspeare) must do either 
the one thing or the other at many points in their life: 
and the latter is the safer thing, and will save from the 



368 CONCERNING GIVING UP 

former. It is the milder form of that suffering which 
follows disappointment and mortification. It is to the 
other as cow-pox to small-pox: by submitting to pass 
through many comings down, you will escape the sad 
misery of many givings up. Yet even vaccination, when 
it takes full effect, though much less serious than small- 
pox, is a painful and disagreeable thing : and in like man- 
ner, coming down in any way, socially, intellectually, 
physically, morally, is an infliction so painful, that men 
have devised various arts by which to escape coming 
down at all. The great way to escape intellectual com- 
ing down, is to hold that men will not do you justice ; 
that the reviewers have conspired against you ; that the 
anonymous assassins of the press stab you out of malig- 
nity and envy ; that you are an unappreciated genius ; 
and that if your powers were only known, you would be 
universally recognized as a very great man. When you 
preach, the people fall asleep : but that is because the 
people are stupid, not because your sermons are dull. 
When you send an article to a magazine, it is rejected : 
that is not because the article is bad, but because the 
editor is a fool. You write a book, and nobody reads it ; 
it is because the book is carelessly printed, and the pub- 
lisher devoid of energy. You paint a picture, and every- 
body laughs at it ; it is because the taste of the age is low. 
You write a prize essay, and don't get the prize ; it is be- 
cause the judges had an objection to sound doctrine. And 
indeed there have been great men to whom their own age 
did injustice ; and you may be one of these. It is highly 
probable that you are not. It is highly probable that 
your mark is gauged pretty fairly ; no doubt it is lower 
than you think right : but it is best to come down to it. 
It is but a foolish world, and it will not last long ; and 



AXD COMIXG DOWN. 369 

there are things more excellent than even to be a very 
clever man, and to be recognized as such. It is curious 
how men soothe themselves and avoid coming down, or 
mitigate the pain of doing so, by secretly cherishing the 
belief that in some one little respect they are different 
from, and higher than, all the rest of their kind. And it 
is wonderful how such a reflection has power to break 
one's fall, so to speak. You don't much mind being only 
a commonplace man in all other respects, if only there 
be one respect in which you can fondly believe you are 
superior to everybody else. A very little thing will suf- 
fice. A man is taller than anybody else in the town or 
parish ; he has longer hair ; he can walk faster ; he is 
the first person who ever crossed the new bridge ; when 
the queen passed near she bowed to him individually ; 
he was the earliest in the neighbourhood who got the 
perforated postage stamps ; he has the swiftest horse in 
the district ; he has the largest cabbages ; he has the old- 
est watch : one Smith spells his name as no other Smith 
w^as ever known to do. It is quite wonderful how far it 
is possible for men to find reason for cherishing in their 
heart a deep-seated belief, that in something or other 
they stand on a higher platform than all the remainder 
of mankind. Few men live, who do not imagine that in 
some respect they stand alone in the world, or stand first. 
I have seen people quite proud of the unexampled dis- 
ease under which they were suffering. It was none of 
the common maladies that the people round about suf- 
fered from. I have known a country woman boast, 
with undisguised elation, that the doctor had more diffi- 
culty in pulling out her tooth, than he ever before had in 
the case of mortal man. There is not a little country 
pai-ish in Britain, but its population are persuaded that in 

24 



370 CONCERNING GIVING UP 

several respects and for several reasons, it is quite the 
most important in the empire. 

There is an expedient not uncommonly employed by 
men to lessen their mortification when obliged to come 
down, which may possibly be effectual as a salve to 
wounded vanity, but which is in the last degree misera- 
ble and contemptible. It consists in endeavouring to 
bring everybody else down along with you. A man is 
unpopular as a preacher ; he endeavours to disseminate 
the notion that the clergyman of the next parish is un- 
popular too, and that the current reports about his- 
church being overcrowded, are gross exaggerations. 
A man has a very small practice as a physician ; he 
assures an inquiring stranger that Dr. Mimpson, who 
(everybody says) makes fourteen thousand a-year, does 
not really make fourteen hundred. A man's horses are 
always lame ; he tells you malignantly that he knows 
privately, that the fine pair which Smith drives in his 
drag, are very groggy, and require to be shod with 
leather. Now I do not mean to assert that there is any 
essential malignity in a man's feeling comfort, when 
obliged to come down himself, in the reflection that other 
■men have had to come down too ; and that after coming 
(down he still stands on the same level with multitudes 
more. It is a natural thing to find a certain degree of 
consolation in such reflections. Notwithstanding what 
Milton says to the contrary, there is no doubt at all that 
' fellowship in pain ' does ' divide smart.' If you were 
the only bald man in the world, or the only lame man, or 
the only man who had lost several teeth, you would find 
it much harder to resign your mind to your condition ; in 
brief, to come down to it. There is real and substantial 
mitigation of all human ills and mortifications in the sight 



AND COMING DOWN. 371 

of others as badly off. To fall on the ice along with 
twenty more is no great matter, unless indeed the physi- 
cal suffering be great. To be guillotined as one of fifty 
is not nearly so bad as to go all alone. To be beaten in 
a competition along with half" a dozen very clever fellows 
mitigates your mortification. The poor fellow, plucked 
for his degree, is a little cheered up when he goes out 
for a walk with three other men who have been plucked 
along with him. Napoleon, standing before a picture 
in which Alexander the Great was a figure, evinced a 
pleasing touch of nature when he said repeatedly, * Alex- 
ander was smaller than me ; much smaller.' The thing 
which I condemn is not that the man who has come down 
should look around with pleasure on his brethren in mis- 
fortune, but that the man who has come down should 
seek to pull down to his own level those whom in his 
secret soul he knows stand on a higher. What I con- 
demn is envious and malignant detraction, with its train 
of wilful misrepresentation, sly innuendoes, depreciating 
shrugs and nods. I hate to hear a man speaking in 
terms of faint praise of another who has outstripped him 
in their common profession, saying that he is * rather a 
clever lad,' that he ' really has some talent,' that he is 
' not wholly devoid of power,' that he ' has done better 
than could be expected,' and the like. Very contempti- 
ble is a method of depreciation which I have often wit- 
nessed. It consists in asserting that Mr. A., whom every- 
body knows for a very ordinary man, is far superior to 
Mr. B., whom you are commending as a man of superior 
parts. I remember a certain public meeting. Dr. C. 
made a most brilliant and stirring speech ; Dr. D. fol- 
lowed in a very dull one ; Mr. E. next made a decent 
one. After the meeting was over, the envious E. thought 



372 CONCERNING GIVING UP 

to take down C, and cover his own coming down, by walk- 
ing up to T>., and in a very marked manner, in the presence 
of C, congratulating D. on having made the speech of the 
evening. Oh, that we could all learn to acknowledge 
with frankness and heartiness the merit that overtops us ! 
Don't let us try to pull it down. Read Avith pleasure the 
essay which you feel is far better than you could have 
written: listen with improvement to the sermon which 
you feel is far better than you could have preached. I 
think envy is a distant feeling. In a true heart it cannot 
live when you have come to know the envied man well. 
It is in our nature to like the man that surpassed us when 
we come to know him. Perhaps it is impossible to look at 
merit or success in our own peculiar line without mak- 
ing an involuntary comparison between these and our 
own. Perhaps it is natural to fancy that our great 
doings have hardly, as yet, met the appreciation they 
deserved. But I do not believe that it is natural, except 
in men of very bad natures, to cherish any other feeling 
than a kindly one towards the man whose powers are 
so superior to ours, that with hardly an apparent effort 
he beats us, far as Eclipse beat his compeers, in the 
especial walk of our own tastes and talents, when we 
have done our most laborious and our best. 

It is oftentimes a real kindness to assure a man, though 
not quite truly, that he is not coming down. It may tend 
to keep him from giving up. Very transparent decep- 
tions sometimes suffice to deceive us. You remember 
how Dr. Johnson, when he was breaking up in the last 
weeks of his long life, felt very indignant at any one who 
told him that in health and strength he was coming down. 
Once, when the gpod man was tottering on the verge of 
the grave, a new acquaintance said to him, ' Ah, doctor, 



AND COMING DOWN. 373 

I see the glow of health returning to your cheek : ' where- 
upon Johnson grasped his hand warmly, and said, ' God 
bless you : you are the kindest friend I ever had ! ' If 
you, benevolent reader, wish to do a kindness, and to 
elicit a grateful feeling, go and tell a man who is growing 
bald that his hair is getting thicker : tell a man of seventy 
that he is every day looking younger : tell a man who 
can now walk but at a slow pace that he walks uncom- 
monly fast : tell a middle-aged lady whose voice is crack- 
ing, that it is always growing finer : tell a cottager who is 
proud of his garden, about the middle of October, that 
his garden is looking more blooming than in June : tell 
the poor artisan, the skilled workman, who has been driv- 
en by want of work to take to breaking stones for the 
road (which in the Scotch mind holds the place which 
sweeping a crossing holds in the English) that you are 
pleased to see he has got nice light work for these 
winter days ; and if you be the parish clergyman, stop 
for a few minutes and talk cheerfully to him : if you 
passed that poor down-hearted fellow to-day with only a 
slight recognition, he would certainly fancy (with the in- 
genious self-torment of fallen fortunes) that you did it 
because he has been obliged so sadly to come down. But 
if you want to prove yourself devoid of the instinctive 
benevolence of the gentleman, you will walk up to the 
man with a look of mingled grief and astonishment, and 
say, ' O, John, I am sorry to see you have come to this ! ' 
I have seen the like done. I have known people who, 
not from malignity, but from pure stolidity and coarse- 
ness of nature, would insist on impressing on the man's 
mind how far he had come down. Geliraer at Rome (or 
Constantinople, I forget which) did not feel his fall more 
than the decent Scotch carpenter or mason busy at his 



374 CONCERNING GIVING UP 

heap of stones by the roadside. And who, that had 
either heart or head, but would rather try to keep him up, 
than to take him further down ? It is the delicate dis- 
cernment of these things that marks the gentleman and 
the gentlewoman. Such instinctively shrink from saying 
or doing a thing that will pain the feelings of another : if 
they say or do anything of the kind, it is not because 
they don't know what they are about. While vulgar 
people go through life, unintentionally and ignorantly 
sticking pins into more sensitive natures at every turn. 
You, my friend, accidentally meet an old school compan- 
ion. You think him a low looking fellow as could well be 
seen. But you say to him kindly that you are happy to 
see him looking so well. He replies to you, with a con- 
founded candour, ' I cannot say that of you ; you are look- 
ing very old and careworn.' The boor did not mean to 
say anything disagreeable. It was pure want of discern- 
ment. It was simply that he is not a gentleman, and 
never can now be made one. ' Your daughter, poor 
thing, is getting hardly any partners,' said a vulgar rich 
woman to an old lady in a ball-room : ' it is really very 
bad of the young men.' The vulgar rich woman fancied 
she was making a kind and sympathetic remark. It is 
to be recorded that sometimes such remarks have their 
origin not in ignorance but in intentional malignity. Mr. 
Snarling, of this neighbourhood, deals in such. He sees 
a man looking cheerful after dinner, and laughing heart- 
ily. Mr. Snarling exclaims, ' Bless me, how flushed you 
are getting ! Did any of your relations die of apo- 
plexy?' If you should cough in the unhappy wretch's 
presence, he will ask, with an anxious look, if there is 
consumption in your family. And he will receive your 
negative answer with an ominous shake of his head. ' I 



AND COMING DOWN. 375 

am sorry to hear,' says Mr. Snarling, the week after your 
new horse comes home, ' I am sorry to hear about that 
animal proving such a bad bargain. I was sure the dealer 
would cheat you.' ' It was very sad indeed,' says Mr. 
Snarling, ' that you could not get that parish which you 
wanted.' He shakes his head, and kindly adds, ' Espe- 
cially, as you were so very anxious to get it.' ' I read the 
December number of Fraser ' (in which you have an ar- 
ticle), says the fellow, 'and of all the contemptible rub- 
bish that ever was printed, that was decidedly the worst.' 
You cannot refrain from the retort, ' Yes, it was very 
stupid of the editor to refuse that article you sent him : it 
w^ould have raised the character of the magazine.' Snarl- 
ing's face grows blue : he was not aware that you knew 
so much. Never mind poor Snarling : he punishes him- 
self very severely. Only a man who is very unhappy 
himself will go about doing all he can to make others un- 
happy. And gradually Snarling is understood, and then 
Snarling is shunned. 

I trust that none of my readers have in them anything 
of the snarling spirit ; but I doubt not that even the 
best-natured of them have occasionally met with human 
beings who were blown up with vanity and conceit to a 
degree so thoroughly intolerable, that it would have been 
felt as an unspeakable privilege to be permitted (so to 
speak) to stick a skewer into the great inflated wind-bag, 
and to take the individual several pegs down. It is fit and 
pleasing that a man in any walk of life should magnify his 
office, and be pleased with his own proficiency in its du- 
ties. One hkes to see that. The man will be the hap- 
pier, and will go through his work the better. But the 
irritating thing is to find a human being who will talk of 
nothing whatsoever except himself, and his own doings 
and importance ; who plainly shows that he feels not the 



376 CONCERNING GIVING UP 

least interest in any other topic of discourse ; and who is 
ever trying to bring back the conversation to number one. 
I have at this moment in my mind's eye a man, a woman, 
and a lad, in each of whom conceit appears to a degree 
which I never saw paralleled elsewhere. When you look 
at or listen to any one of them, the analogy to the blown- 
up bladder instantly suggests itself. They are very much 
alike in several respects. They are not ill-natured : though 
very commonplace, they are not utter blockheads : their 
great characteristic is self-complacency so stolid that it 
never will see reason to come down ; and so pachy- 
dermatous that it will be unaware of any gentle ef- 
fort to take it down. There is a beautiful equanim- 
ity about the thorough dunce. He is so completely 
stupid, that he never for an instant suspects that he is 
stupid at all. He never feels any necessity to intel- 
lectually come down. A clever man has many fears that 
his powers are but small, but your entire booby knows no 
such fear. The clever man can appreciate, when done 
by another, that which he could not have done himself: 
and he is able to make many comparisons which take him 
down. But there are men, who could read a sermon of 
their own, and then a sermon by the bishop of Oxford, 
and see no great difference between the two. 

And now, kindly reader, we have arrived at the end of 
the six long slips of paper, and this essay approaches its 
close. Let me say, before laying down the pen, that it is 
for commonplace people I write, when I advise those who 
look at these pages to come down intellectually to the 
mark fixed for them by their fellow-creatures — to believe 
that they are estimated pretty fairly, and appreciated 
much as they deserve. You and I, my friend, may pos- 
sibly have fancied, once upon a time, that we were great 
and remarkable men ; but many takings down have 



AND COMING DOWN. 377 

taught us to think soberly, and we know better now. We 
shall never do anything very extraordinary : our biog- 
raphy will not be written after we are gone. So be it. 
Fiat Voluntas Tua! We are quite content to come 
down genially. It does not matter much that we never 
shall startle the world with the echoes of our fame. Let 
us rank ourselves with ' Nature's unambitious under- 
wood, and flowers that prosper in the shade.' But, of 
course, there are great geniuses who ought not thus to 
come down — men who, though lightly esteemed by those 
around them, will some day take their place, by the con- 
sent of all enlightened judges, among the most illustrious 
of human kind. The very powers which are yet to 
make you famous, may tend to make the ignorant folk 
around you regard you as a crackbrained fool. You re- 
member the beautiful fairy tale of the ugly duckling. 
The poor little thing was laughed at, pecked, and perse- 
cuted, because it was so different from the remainder of 
the brood, till it fled away in despair. But it was unap- 
preciated, just because it was too good ; for it grew up at 
length, and then met universal admiration : the ugly 
duckling was a beautiful swan ! Even so that great man 
John Foster, preaching among a petty dissenting sect 
fifty years since, was set down as ' a perfect fool.' But 
intelligent men have fixed his mark now. It was because 
he was a swan that the quacking tribe thought him such 
an ugly duck. Tou may be such another. The chance 
is, indeed, ten thousand to one that you are not. Still, if 
you have the fixed consciousness of the divine gift within 
you, do not be false to your nature. Resolutely refuse to 
come down — only be assured, my friend, that should 
such be your resolution, you will have to resist many 
temptations to give up ! 




CHAPTER XII. 

CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 

F any man wishes to write with vigour and 
decision upon one side of any debated ques- 
tion, it is highly expedient that he should 
write before he has thought much or long 
upon the debated question. For calmly to look at a sub- 
ject in all its bearings, and dispassionately to weigh that 
which may be said -pro and con.^ is destructive of that un- 
hesitating conviction which takes its side and keeps it 
without a misgiving whether it be the right side, and 
which discerns in all that can be said by others, and in 
all that is suggested by one's own mind, only something 
to confirm the conclusion already arrived at. It must be 
often a very painful thing to have what may be termed a 
judicial mind — that is, a mind so entirely free from bias 
of its own, that in forming its opinion upon any subject, 
it is decided simply by the merits of the case as set be- 
fore it ; for the arguments on either side are sometimes 
all but exactly balanced. Yet it may be necessary to 
say yes to the one side and no to the other ; it may be im- 
possible to make a compromise — i. e., to say to both sides 
at once both yes and no. And if great issues depend 
upon the conclusion come to, a conscientious man may 
undergo an indescribable distraction and anguish before 
he concludes what to believe or to do. If a man be lord- 



CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 379 

chancellor, or general commanding an army in action, 
there must often be a keen misery in the incapacity to 
decide which of two competing courses has most to say 
for itself. Oh, that every question could be answered 
rightly by either yes or no ! Oh, that one side in every 
quarrel, in every debate, were decidedly right, and the 
other decidedly wrong ! Or, if that cannot be, the next 
blessing that is to be desired by a human being who 
wishes to be of use where God has put him in this world, 
is, the gift of vigorous and intelligent one-sidedness ; for 
in practice conflicting views are often so nearly balanced, 
and the loss of time and energy caused by indecision is 
so great, that it is better to adopt the w^rong view reso- 
lutely, and act upon it unhesitatingly, than to adopt the 
right view dubiously, and take the right path falteringly, 
and often looking back. And one feels somehow as if 
there were something degrading in indecision ; something 
manly and dignified in a vigorous will, provided that vig- 
orous will be barely clear of the charge of blind, uncal- 
culating obstinacy. For the spiritual is unquestionably a 
higher thing than the material, the living is better than 
the inert, the man than the machine. But the judicial 
mind approaches to the nature of a machine. It seems 
to lack the power of originating action ; to be deteiTnined 
entirely by foreign forces. It is simply a very delicate 
pair of scales. In one scale you put all that can be said 
on one side, in the other scale you put all that can be 
said on the other side, and the beam passively follows the 
greater weight. Of course, the analogy between the 
physical and the spiritual is never perfect. The scales 
which weigh argument differ in various respects from the 
scales which weigh sugar or tea. The material weighing- 
machine accepts its weights at the value marked upon 



380 CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 

them, while the spiritual weighing-machine has the addi- 
tional anguish of deciding whether the argument put into 
it shall be esteemed as an ounce, a pound, or a ton. 

All this which has been said has been keenly felt by 
the writer in thinking of the subject of the present essay. 
I am sorry now that I did not begin to write it sooner. I 
could then have taken my side without a scruple, and 
have expressed an opinion which would have been reso- 
lute if not perfectly right. Various facts which came 
within my observation impressed upon me the fact that, 
in the judgment of very many people, there is a dignity 
about dulness. Various considerations suggested them- 
selves as tending to prove that it is absurd to regard dul- 
ness as a dignified thing ; and the business of the essay 
was designed to be, first to state and illustrate the com- 
mon view, and next, to show that the common view is 
absurd. But who is there that does not know how in most 
instances, if it strikes you on a first glance that the 
majority of mankind hold and act upon a behef that is 
absurd, longer thought shakes your confident opinion, and 
ultimately you land in the conviction that the majority of 
mankind are quite right ? The length of time requisite 
to reach those second thoughts which are proverbially 
best, varies much. It seems to require a lifetime (at 
least for men of warm heart and quick brain) to arrive 
at calm, enduring sense in the complications of political 
and social science. 

In the mellow autumn of his days, the man who started 
as a republican, communist, and atheist, has settled (never 
again to be moved) into liberal conservatism and unpre- 
tending Christianity. It requires two or three years 
(reckoning from the first inoculation with the poison) to 
return to common sense in metaphysics. For myself. 



CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 381 

it cost a week of constant thought to reach my present 
wit-stand, which may be briefly expressed as follows. 
Although many men carry their belief in the dignity of 
dulness to an unjustifiable excess, yet there is no small 
amount of sense in the doctrine of the dignity of dulness. 
Thus, in the lengthening light of various April evenings, 
did the writer muse ; thus, while looking at many cro- 
cuses, yellow in the sun of several April mornings. Why 
is it, thought I, that dulness is dignified ? Why is it, 
that to write a book which no mortal can read, because it 
is so heavy and uninteresting, is a more dignified thing 
than to write a book so pleasing and attractive that it 
shall be read (not as work, but as play) by thousands ? 
Why is it that any article, essay, or treatise, which han- 
dles a grave subject and propounds grave truth, only in 
an interesting and readable style, is at once marked with 
the black cross of contempt, by being referred to the class 
of light literature, and spoken of as flimsy, flashy, slight, 
and the like ; while a treatise on the self-same subject, 
setting out the self-same views, only in a ponderous, 
wearisome, unreadable, and (in brief) dull fashion, is 
regarded as a composition solid, substantial, and emi- 
nently respectable ? Is it not hard, that by many stupid 
people a sermon is esteemed as deep, massive, theologi- 
cal, solid, simply because it is such that they find they 
cannot for their lives attend to it ; and another sermon is 
held as flimsy, superficial, flashy, light, simply because it 
attracts or compels their attention ? And I saw that the 
doctrine of the dignity of dulness, as held by common- 
place people, is at the first glance mischievous and absurd, 
and apparently invented by stupid men for their encour- 
agement in their stupidity. But gradually the thought 
developed itself, that rapidity of movement is inconsis- 



382 CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 

tent with dignity. Dignity is essentially a slow thing. 
Agility of mind, no less than of body, befits it not. Rapid 
processes of thought, quick turns of feeling — a host of 
the little arts and characteristics which give interest to 
composition — have too much of the nimble and mercu- 
rial about them. A harlequin in ceaseless motion is un- 
dignified ; a chief justice, sitting very still on the bench 
and scarcely moving, save his hands and head, is toler- 
ably dignified ; the king of Siam at a state pageant, sitting 
in a gallery in a sumptuous dress, and so immovable, 
even to his eyes, that foreign ambassadors have doubted 
whether he were not a wax figure, is very dignified ; but 
the most dignified of all in the belief of millions of people 
of extraordinary stupidity was the Hindoo deity Brahm, 
who through innumerable ages remained in absolute qui- 
escence, never stirring, and never doing anything what- 
ever. So here, I thought, is the key of the mystery. 
There is a general prepossession that slowness has more 
dignity than agility ; and a particular application of this 
general prepossession leads to a common belief, sometimes 
grossly absurd, sometimes not without reason, that dul- 
ness is a dignified thing. 

Would you know, my youthful reader, how to earn the 
high estimation of the great majority of steady-going old 
gentlemen? I will tell you how. You have, in the 
morning, attended a public meeting for some religious or 
benevolent purposes. Many speeches were made there. 
In the evening you meet at dinner a grave and cautious 
man, advanced in years, whom you beheld in a seat of 
eminence on the platform, and you begin to discourse of the 
speeches with him. Call to your remembrance the speech 
you liked best — the interesting, stirring, thrilling one 
that wakened you up when the others had wellnigh sent 



CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS- 383 

you to sleep — the speech that you held your breath to 
listen to, and that made your nerves tingle and your 
heart beat faster, and say to the old gentleman, ' Do you 
remember Mr. A.'s speech ? Mere flash ! Very super- 
ficial. Flimsy. All figures and flowers. Flights of 
fancy. Nothing solid. Very well for superficial people, 
but nothing there for people who think.' Then fix on 
the very dullest and heaviest of all the speeches made. 
Fix on the speech that you could not force yourself to 
listen to, though, when you did by a great effort follow 
two or three sentences, you saw it was very good sense, 
but insufferably dull ; and say to the old gentleman, 
' Very different with the speech of Mr. B. Ah, there 
was mind there ! Something that you could grasp ! 
Good sound sense. No flash. None of your extravagant 
flights of imagination. Admirable matter. Who cares 
for oratory ? Give me substance ! ' Say all this, my 
youthful reader, to the solid old gentleman, and you will 
certainly be regarded by him as a young man of sound 
sense, and with taste and judgment mature beyond your 
years. And if you wish to deepen the favourable impres- 
sion you have made, you may go on to complain of the 
triviality of modern literature. Say that you think the 
writings of Mr. Thackeray wearisome and unimproving ; 
for your part, you would rather read the sermons of Doc- 
tor Log. Say that Fraser's Magazine is flippant : you 
prefer the Journal of the Statistical Society. You can- 
not go wrong. You have an unerring rule. You have 
merely to consider what things, books, speeches, articles, 
sermons, you find most dull and stupid : then declare in 
their favour. Acknowledge the grand principle of the 
dignity of dulness. So shall the old gentleman tell his 
fellows that you have ' got a head.' There is ' something 



384 CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 

in you.' You are an ' uncommon fine young man.' The 
truth meanwhile will be, either that you are an impostor, 
shamming what you do not think, or a man of most extraor- 
dinary and anomalous tastes, or an incorrigible blockhead. 
But whatever you may be yourself, do not fall into 
error in your judgment of the old gentleman and his com- 
peers. Do not think of him uncharitably. If he made 
a speech at the meeting, you may be ready to conclude 
that the reason why he preferred the dull speech to the 
brilliant one is, that his own speech was very, very dull. 
And no doubt, in some cases, it is envy and jealousy that 
prompt the commonplace man to underrate the brilliant 
appearances of the brilliant man. It must be a most 
soothing thought to the ambitious man of inferior ability 
that the speech, sermon, or volume which greatly sur- 
passes his own shall be regarded by many as not so good 
as his own, just because it is so incomparably better. It 
would be a pleasing arrangement for all race-horses 
which are lame and broken-winded, that because Eclipse 
distances the field so far, Eclipse shall therefore be ad- 
judged to have lost the race. And precisely analogous 
is the floating belief in many commonplace minds, that if 
a discourse or composition be brilliant, it cannot be solid ; 
that if it be interesting, this proves it to be flimsy. No 
doubt brilliancy is sometimes attained at the expense of 
solidity ; no doubt some writings and speeches are inter- 
esting whose body of thought is very slight ; which, as 
Scotch people say, have very little in them. But the vul- 
gar belief on this matter really amounts to this : that if a 
speech, sermon, or book be very good, this proves it to 
be very bad. And as most people who produce such things 
produce very bad ones, you may easily see how willingly 
this belief is accepted by most people. Still, this does 



CONCERNINCx THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 385 

not entirely explain the opinion expressed by the old gen- 
tleman already mentioned. It does not necessarily follow 
that he declares the speech of Mr. A. to be bad simply 
because he knows it was provokingly good, nor that he 
declares the speech of Mr. B. to be good simply because 
he knows it was soothingly bad. The old gentleman may 
, have been almost or even enth'ely sincere in the opinion 
he expressed. 

By long habit, and by pushing into an extreme a be- 
lief which has a substratum of truth, he may have come 
to regard with suspicion the speech which interests him, 
and to take for granted, with little examination of the fact 
of the case, that it must be flimsy and slight, else he 
could not take it in so pleasantly and easily. And all 
this founds not merely on the grand principle of the dio-- 
nity of dulness, but likewise on the impassable nature of 
the gulf which parts instruction from amusement, work 
from play. Work, it is assumed as an axiom, is of the 
nature of pain. To get solid instruction costs exertion : 
it is work : it is a painful thing. And the consequence 
is, that when a man of great skill and brilliant talent is 
able to present solid instruction in a guise so attractive 
that it becomes pleasant instead of painful to receive it, 
you are startled. Your suspicions are aroused. You be- 
gin to think that he must have sacrificed the solid and 
the useful. This cannot be work, you think : it must be 
play, for it is pleasant. This cannot be instruction, you 
think : it must be amusement, for it is easy and agreeable 
to follow it. This cannot be a right sermon, you think, 
for it does not put me asleep : it must be a flimsy and 
flashy declamation : or some such disparaging expression 
is used. This cannot be the normal essay, you think, for 
you read it through without yawning ; you don't know 

25 



386 CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DUENESS. 

what is wrong, but you are safe in saying that its order of 
thought must be very hght ; the fact that you could read 
it without yawning proves that it is so. You forget the 
alternative, that solid and weighty thought, both in essay 
and sermon, may have been made easy to follow, by the 
interesting fashion in which they were put before you. 
But stupid people forget this alternative : they never 
think of it, or they reject it at the first mention of it. It 
is too absurd. It ignores the vital difference between 
work and play. Try a parallel case with an unsophisti- 
cated understanding, and you will see how ingrained in 
our nature is this prejudice. Your little boy is ill. He 
must have some medicine. You give him some of a 
most nauseous taste. He takes it, and feels certain that 
it will make him well. It must be medicine, he knows ; 
and good medicine ; because it is so abominably disagree- 
able. But give the little man some healing balm (if you 
can find it) whose taste is pleasant. He is surprised. His 
faith in the medicine is shaken. It wont make him well ; 
it cannot be right medicine ; because to take it is not 
painful or disagreeable. A poor girl in the parish was 
dying of consumption. Her parents had heard of cod- 
liver oil. They got the livers of certain cod-fish and man- 
lufactured oil for themselves. It was hideous to see, to 
smell, and to taste. I procured a bottle of the proper oil, 
and took it up to my poor parishioner. But it was plain 
that neither she nor her parents had much faith in it. It 
was not disgusting. It had little taste or odor. It was 
easy to take. And it was plain, though the girl used it 
to please me, that the belief in the cottage was, that by 
eliminating the disgusting element, you eliminated the 
virtue of the oil ; in brief, that when medicine ceases to 
be disagreeable, it ceases to be useful. There is in hu- 



CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 387 

man nature an inveterate tendency to judge so. And it 
was this inveterate tendency, much more than any spirit 
of envy or jealousy, that was at the foundation of the 
old man's opinion, that the dull speech or sermon was the 
best ; that the interesting speech or sermon was flimsy. 
All the virtue of the cod-liver oil was there, though the 
nauseous accompaniments were gone ; and solid thought 
and sound reasoning may have been present in quantity 
as abundant and quality as admirable in the interesting 
speech as in the dull one ; but it is to be confessed 
the a priori presumption was the other way. There must 
be something — you don't know what — wrong about the 
work which is as pleasant as play. There must be some- 
thing — you cannot say what — amiss about the sermon 
which is as interesting as a novel. It cannot be sound in- 
struction, which is as agreeable as amusement ; any more 
than black can be white, or pain can be pleasure. That 
is the unspoken, undefined, uneradicable behefof the dull 
majority of human kind. And it appears, day by day, 
in the depreciatory terras in which stupid, and even com- 
monplace, people talk of compositions which are brilliant, 
interesting, and attractive, as though the fact of their pos- 
sessing these characteristics were proof sufficient tliat they 
lack solidity and sound sense. 

Now, the root of the prevalent error (so far as it is an 
error) appears to me to lie in this ; that sound instruction 
and solid thought are regarded as analogous to medicine ; 
whereas they ought to be regarded as analogous to food. 
It may possibly be assumed, that medicine is a thing such 
in its essential nature, that to be useful, it must be disa- 
greeable. But I believe that it is now universally ad- 
mitted, that the food which is most pleasant to take, is the 
most wholesome and nutritious. The time is past in 



388 CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 

which philosophic and strong-minded persons thought it 
a fine thing to cry up a Spartan repulsiveness in the mat- 
ter of diet. Raw steaks, cut from a horse which died a 
natural death ; and the sour milk of mares, are no longer 
considered the provender upon which to raise men who 
shall be of necessity either thoughtful or heroic. Unhap- 
pily, in the matter of the dietetics of the mind, the old 
notion still prevails with very many. And there is some- 
thing to be said for it ; but only what might also be said 
for it in regard to the food of the body. For though, as 
a general rule, the most agreeable food is the most whole- 
some, yet there is an extensive kingdom into which this 
law does not extend ; I mean the domain of sugar-plums, 
of pastry, of crystallized fruits, and the like. These are 
pleasant ; but you cannot live upon them ; and you ought 
not to take much at a time. And if you give a child the 
unlimited run of such materials for eating, the child will 
assuredly be the worse for it. Well, in mental food the 
analogy holds. Here, too, is a realm of sweets, of dev- 
illed bones, of cura9oa. Feverish poetry, ultra-senti- 
mental romance, eccentric wit and humour, are the paral- 
lel things. Rabelais, Sterne, The Doctor of Southey, 
the poetry of Mrs. Hemans, the plays of Otway, Mar- 
lowe, Ford, and Dekker, may all, in limited quantity, be 
partaken of with relish and advantage by the healthy ap- 
petite ; but let there not be too much of them ; and do 
not think to nourish your intellectual nature on such food 
alone. No child, shiny with excessive pastry, or tooth- 
aching and sulky through superabundant sugar-plums, is 
in a plight more morbid and disagreeable than is the 
clever boy or girl of eighteen, who from the dawn of the 
taste for reading, has been turned into a large library to 
choose books at will, and who has crammed an inexperi- 



CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 389 

encecl head and undisciplined heart with extravagant fan- 
cies and unreal feelings from an exclusive diet of novels 
and plays. But, setting aside the department of sweets, I 
maintain, that given wholesome food, the more agreeably 
it is cooked and served up, the better ; and given sound 
thought, the more interesting and attractive the guise in 
which it is presented, the better. And all this may be, 
without the least sacrifice of the sound and substantial 
qualities. No matter what you are writing — sermon, 
article, book — let Sydney Smith's principle be remem- 
bered, that every style is good, except the tiresome. And 
who does not know, that there have been men who, with- 
out the least sacrifice of solidity, have invested all they 
had to say with an enchaining interest ; and led the reader 
through the most abstruse metaphysics, the closest rea- 
soning, the most intricate mazes of history, the gravest 
doctrines of theology, in such fashion that the reader was 
profited while he thought he was only being delighted, 
and charmed while he was informed ! 

The thing has been done ; of course it is very difficult 
to do it ; and to do it demands remarkable gifts of nature 
and training. The extraordinary thing is that where a 
man has, by much pains, or by extraordinary felicity, 
added interest to utility, — given you solid thought in an 
attractive form, — many people will, and that not entirely 
of envy, but through bona fide stupidity, at once say that 
the interesting sermon, the picturesque history, the lively 
argwment, is flimvsy and flashy, superficial, wanting in 
de})th, and so forth. Yet if you think it unpardonable in 
the cook, who has excellent food given to prepare, to send 
it up spoiled and barely eatable, is it not quite as bad in 
the man who has given to him important facts, solemn 
doctrines, weighty reasons, yet who presents them to his 



390 CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 

readers or hearers in a tough, dry, stupid shape ? Does 
the turbot, the saddle of mutton, cease to be nutritious 
because it is well cooked ? And wherefore, then, should 
the doctrine or argument become flimsy because it is put 
skilfully and interestingly ? I do believe there are people 
who think tliat in the world of mind, if a good beef-steak 
be well cooked, it turns in the process into a stick of bar- 
ley-sugar. 

To this class belongs the great majority of stupid 
people, and also of quiet, steady-going people, of fair 
average ability. Among the latter there is not only a 
dishke of clever men, arising from envy : but a real 
honest fear of what they may do, arising from a belief 
that a very clever man cannot be a safe or judicious 
man, and that a striking view cannot be a sound view. 
Once upon a time, in a certain church, I heard a ser- 
mon preached by a certain great preacher. The congre- 
gation listened with breathless attention. The sermon 
was indeed a very remarkable one ; and I remember 
well how I thought that never before had I under- 
stood the magic spell which is exerted by fervid elo- 
quence. And walking away from church, I was looking 
back upon the track of thought over which the preacher 
had borne the congregation, and thinking how skilfully 
and admirably he had carried his hearers, easily and 
interestedly, through very difficult ground, and over a 
very long journey. Thus musing, I encountered a very 
stupid clergyman who had been in church too. *^Did 

you hear Mr. M ? ' said he. ' It was mere flash ; 

very flimsy ; all flowers. Nothing solid.' With wonder 
I regarded my stupid friend. I said to him : Strip 
off from the sermon all the fancy and all the feeling ; 
look at the bare skeleton of thou^^ht : and then I stated 



CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 391 

it to the man. Is not that, said I, a marvel of meta- 
physical aciiteness, of rigorous logic, of exact symmetry ? 
Cut off the flash as you call it ; here is the solid re- 
siduum ; is that slight or flashy ? Is there not three 
times the thought of ordinary humdrum sermons even 
in quantity, not to name the incalculable difference in 
the matter of quality ? On this latter point, indeed, I 
did not insist ; for with some folk quantity is the only 
measure of thought ; and in the world of ideas a turnip 
is with such equal to a pineapple, provided they be of 
the same size. ' Don't you see,' said I, with growing 
wrath, to my stupid friend, who regarded me meanwhile 
with a stolid stare, ' that it only shows what an admi- 
rable preacher Mr. M is, if he was able to carry a 

whole congregation in rapt attention along a line of 
thought, in traversing which you and I would have put 
all our hearers asleep ? You and I might possibly have 
given the thought like the diamond as it comes from the 
mine, a dull pebble ; and because that eminent man 
gave it polished and glancing, is it therefore not a dia- 
mond still ? ' Of course, it was vain to talk. The 
stolid preacher kept by his one idea. The sermon 
could not be solid, because it was brilliant. Because 
there was gleam and glitter, there could not be any- 
thing besides. What more could be said ? I knew that 
my stupid friend had on his side the majority of the 
race. 

It is irritating when you have written an essay with 
care, after a great deal of thouglit, to find people talk 
slightingly of it as very light. 'The essays of Mr. 

Q are sensible and well written, but the order of 

thought is of the lightest.' I found these words in a 
review of certain essays, written by a man who had 



392 CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 

evidently read the essays. Ask people what they mean 
by such vague phrases of disparagement ; and if you 
can get them to analyze their feeling, you will find that 
in five cases out of six, they mean simply that they can 
read the compositions with interest ? Is that anything 
against them? That does not touch the question whether 
they are weighty and sound. They may be sound and 
weighty for all that. Of course, that which is called 
severe thought cannot, however skilfully put and illus- 
trated, be so easily followed by undisciplined minds. 
But in most cases the people who talk of a man's writ- 
ings being light, know nothing at all about severe think- 
ing. They mean that they are sure that an essay is 
solid, if they find it uninteresting. It must be good if 
it be a weary task to get through it. The lack of inter- 
est is the great test that the composition is of a high 
order. It must be dignified, because it is so dull. You 
read it with pleasure ; therefore it must be flimsy. You 
read it with weariness ; therefore it must be solid. Or, 
to put the principle in its simplest form — the essay 
must be bad because it is so good. The essay must be 
good, because it is so bad. Here we have the founda- 
tion principle of the grand doctrine of the dignity of 
dulness. 

And, by hosts of people, the principle is unsparingly 
applied. An interesting book is flimsy, because it is 
interesting. An interesting sermon is flimsy, because it 
is interesting. They are referred to the class of light 
literature. And it is undignified to be light. It is 
grand, it is clerical, it is worthy of a cabinet minister, 
it is even archiepiscopal, to write a book which no one 
would voluntarily read. But some stupid people tliink 
it unclerical to write a book which sensible folk will 



CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 393 

read with pleasure. It would amuse Mr. Kingsley, and 
I am sure it would do no more than amuse him, to hear 
what I have heard steady-going individuals say about 
his writings. The question whether the doctrines he en- 
forces be true or not, they cared not for at all. Neither 
did they inquire whether or not he enforces, with sin- 
gular fervor and earnestness, certain doctrines of far- 
reaching practical moment. That matters not. He 
enforces them in books which it is interesting and even 
enchaining to read ; and this suffices (in their judgment) 
to condemn these books. I have heard stupid people 
say that it was not worthy of Archbishop Whately to 
write those admirable Annotations on Bacon^s Essays. 
No doubt that marvellously acute intellect does in those 
Annotations apply itself to a great variety of themes and 
purposes, greater and lesser, like a steam-hammer which 
can weld a huge mass of red-hot iron, and with equal 
facility drive a nail into a plank by successive gentle 
taps. No doubt the volume sometimes discusses grave 
matters in a grave manner, and sometimes matters less 
grave (but still with a serious bearing on life and its 
affiiirs) in a playful manner. But on the whole, if you 
wished to convey to a stranger to the archbishop's writ- 
ings (supposing that among educated people you could 
find one) some notion of the extent and versatility of his 
powers, it is probable that, of all his books, this is the 
one you would advise the stranger to read. ' Not so,' 
said my friend Dr. Log. ' The archbishop should not 
have published such a work.' 

WIio ever heard of an archbishop who wrote a book 
which young men and women woukl read because they 
enjoyed it ? The book could not be dignified, because 
it was not dull. Why did the steady old gentlemen 



394 CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 

among the fellows of a certain college in the university 
of Cambridge, a good many years ago, turn out and 
vote against a certain clergyman's becoming their head, 
who was infinitely the most distinguished of their num- 
ber, and upon whose becoming their head every one had 
counted with certainty ? He was a very distinguished 
scholar, a very successful tutor : a man of dignified man- 
ners and irreproachable character. Had he been no 
more, he had been the head of his college, and he had 
been a bishop now. But there was an objection which, 
in the minds of these frail but steady old gentlemen, 
could not be got over. His sermons were interesting I 
His warmest friends could not say that they were dull. 
When he came to do his duty as select preacher before 
the university, the church wherein he preached was 
crowded to excess. Not merely was the unbecoming 
spectacle witnessed of all the pews being filled ; but it 
could not be concealed that the passages were crowded 
with human beings who were content to stand through- 
out the service. The old gentlemen could not bear this. 
The head of a college must be dignified ; and how could 
a man be dignified who was not dull, even in the pul- 
pit ? The younger fellows were unanimous in the great 
preacher's favour ; but the old gentlemen formed the 
majority, and they were unanimous against him. Some 
people suggested that they were envious of his greater 
eminence : that they wished to put down the man who, 
at a comparatively early age, had so vastly surpassed 
themselves. The theory w^as uncharitable ; it was more 
— it was false. Jealousy had little part in the minds of 
these frail but safe old men. They honestly believed 
that the great preacher could not be solid or dignified, 
because he was brilliant and attractive. They never 



CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 395 

heard his sermons ; but they were sure that something 
must be wrong about the sermons, because multitudes 
wished to hear them. Is not the normal feeling after 
listening to a sermon to its close, one of gentle, unex- 
pressed relief? The great preacher was rejected, and 
an excellent man was elected in his stead, who could not 
fail to be dignified, for never mortal was more dull. 
Cardinal Wiseman tells us very frankly that the great 
principle of the dignity of dulness is always recognized 
and acted on by the gentlemen who elect the pope. 
Gravity, approaching to stolidity ; slowness of motion, 
approaching to entire standing-still ; are (as a general 
rule) requisite in the human beings who succeed to the 
chair of St. Peter. It has been insinuated that in the 
Church of England similar characteristics are (or at 
least were) held essential in those who are made bishops, 
and, above all, archbishops. You can never be sure 
that a man will not do wrong who is likely to do any- 
thing at all. But if it be perfectly ascertained that a 
man will do nothing, you may be satisfied that he will do 
nothing wrong. This is one consideration ; but the 
further one is the pure and simple dignity of dulness. 
A clergyman may look forward to a bishopric if he 
write books which are unreadable, but not if he write 
books which are readable. The chance of Dr. Log is 
infinitely better than that of Mr. Kingsley. And nothing 
can be more certain than that the principle of the dig- 
nity of dulness kept the mitre from the head of Sydney 
Smith. I do not mean to say that he was a suitable 
man to be a bishop. I think he was not. But it was 
not because of anything really unclerical about the 
genial man that he was excluded. The people who ex- 
cluded him did not hesitate to appoint men obnoxious to 



396 CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 

more serious charges than Sydney Smith. But then, 
whatever these men were or were not, they were all 
dull. They wrote much, some of them ; but nobody 
ever read what they wrote. But Sydney Smith was 
interesting. You could read his writings with pleasure. 
He was unquestionably the reverse of dull, and there- 
fore certainly the reverse of dignified. Through much 
of his latter life the same suspicion has, with millions of 
safe-going folk, thrown a shadow on Lord Brougham. 
He was too lively. What he wrote was too interesting. 
Solid old gentlemen feared for his good sense. They 
thought they never could be sure what he would do 
next. Even Lord St. Leonards lost standing with many 
when he published his Handy Book on Property Law. 
A lord-chancellor writing a book sold at railway sta- 
tions, and read (with interest, too) in railway carriages ! 
What was the world coming to ? But it was quite be- 
coming in the great man to produce that elaborate and 
authoritative work on Vendors and Purchasers, of which 
I have often beheld the outside, but never the inside. 
And wherefore did the book beseem a chancellor? 
Wherefore but because to the ordinary reader it was 
heavy as lead. Have not you, my reader, often heard 
like criticism of Lord Campbell's interesting volumes of 
the biography of his predecessors ? ' Very interesting ; 
very well written ; much curious information ; but not 
quite the thing for the first man on the judicial bench of 
Britain to write.' Now, upon what is this criticism 
founded, but upon the grand principle that liveliness and 
interest do not become the compositions of a man in 
important office : in brief, that that is not dignified, 
which is not dull. 

But let us not be extreme. Let it be admitted that the 



CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 397 

principle has some measure of truth. There are facts 
which appear to give it countenance, which really do give 
it countenance. Punch is more interesting than a sermon, 
that is admitted as a fact. The tacit inference is that an 
interesting sermon must have become interesting by un- 
duly approximating to Punch. There is literature which 
may properly be termed light. There is thought which 
is superficial, flimsy, slight, and so on. There are com- 
positions which are brilliant without being solid, in which 
there are many flowers and little fruit. And no doubt, 
by the nature of things, this light and flashy thought is 
more interesting, and more easily followed, than more 
solid material. You can read Vanity Fair when you 
could not read Butler's Analogy. You can read Punch 
when you could not read Vanity Fair. And the a priori 
presumption may be, when you find a composition of a 
grave class which is as interesting as one of a lighter 
class, that this interest has been attained by some sacri- 
fice of the qualities which beseem a composition of a 
grave class. Let our rule be as follows : If the treatise 
under consideration be interesting because it treats of 
light subjects, which in themselves are more interesting 
than grave ones (as play always must be more pleasing 
than work), let the treatise be classed a^ light. But if in 
the treatise you find grave and serious thoughts set out in 
such a fashion as to be interesting, then all honour to the 
author of that treatise ! He is not a slight, superficial 
writer, though stupid people may be ready to call him so. 
He is, in truth, a grave and serious writer, though he has 
succeeded in charming while he instructs. He is truly 
dignified, though he be not dull. He is doing a noble 
work, enforcing a noble principle : the noble principle, to 
wit (which most people silently assume is false), that 



398 CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 

what is right need not of necessity be so very much less 
attractive than what is wrong, The general belief is, 
that right is prosy, humdrum, commonplace, dull ; and 
that the poetry of existence, the gleam, the music, the 
thrill, the romance, are with dehghtful wrong. And tak- 
ing work as the first meridian, marking what is right, 
many people really hold that any approximation to play 
(and all that interests and pleases is in so far an approxi- 
mation to play) is a deflection in the direction of wrong, in- 
asmuch as it is beyond question a marked departure from 
the line of ascertained right. Let us get rid of the no- 
tion ! In morals, the opposite of right need not be wrong. 
Many things are right, and their opposites right too. 
Work is right. Play is the opposite of work, yet play 
is right too. Gravity is right : interest is right too ; and 
though practically these two things seem opposed, they 
need not be so. And as we should bless the man who 
would teach us how to idealize our work into play, so 
should we bless the man who is able to blend gravity and 
interest together. Such a man as Macaulay was virtually 
spreading the flag of defiance in the face of stupid peo- 
ple holding a stupid belief, and declaring by every page 
he wrote, that what is right need not be unpleasant ; that 
what is interesting need not be flimsy ; that what is dig- 
nified need not be dull. 

I am well aw^are that it is hopeless to argue with a prej- 
udice so rooted as that in favour of the dignity of dul- 
ness ; and especially hopeless when I am obliged to ad- 
mit that I cannot entirely oppose that principle, that I 
feel a certain justice in it. Slowness of motion, I have 
said, is essentially more dignified than rapidity of motion. 
There is something dignified about an elephant walking 
along, with massive tramp ; there is nothing dignified 



CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 399 

about a frisking greyhound, light, airy, graceful. And 
it is to be admitted that some men frisk through a 
subject like a greyhound ; others tramp through it like 
an elephant. And though the playful greyhound fashion 
of writing, that dallies and toys with a subject, may be the 
more graceful and pleasing, the dignity doubtless abides 
with the stern, slow, straightforward, elephantine tramp. 
The Essays of Elia delight you, but you stand in no awe 
of their author ; the contrary is the case with a charge of 
Lord Chief-Justice Ellenborough. And so thoroughly 
elephantine are the mental movements of some men, that 
even their rare friskiness is elephantine. Every one 
must know this who is at all acquainted with the ponder- 
ous and cowlike curvetings of the Rambler. Physical 
agility is inconsistent with physical dignity ; mental agil- 
ity with mental dignity. You could not for your life 
very greatly esteem the solemn advices given you from 
the pulpit on Sunday, by a clergyman whom you had 
seen whirling about in a polka on Friday evening. The 
momentum of that rotary movement would cling to 
him (in your feeling) still. I remember when I was a 
little boy what a shock it was to my impressions of judi- 
cial dignity to see a departed chief justice cantering down 
Constitution-hill on a tall, thoroughbred chestnut. The 
swift movement befitted not my recollections of the judg- 
ment-seat, the ermine, the great full-bottomed wig. I felt 
aggrieved and mortified even by the tallness and slender- 
ness of the chestnut horse. Had the judge been mounted 
on a dray horse of enormous girth and vast breadth 
(even if not very high) I should have been comparatively 
content. Breadth was the thing desiderated by the 
youthful heart ; breadth, and the solidity which goes 
with breadth, and the slowness of motion which goes with 



400 CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 

solid extension, and the dignity which goes with slowness 
of motion. I speak of impression made on the undisci- 
plined human soul, doubtless ; but then the normal im- 
pression made by anything is the impression it makes on 
the undisciplined human soul. In the world of mind, 
you may educate human nature into a condition in which 
all tendencies shall be reversed ; in which fire shall wet 
you, and water dry you. Who does not know that the 
estimation in which the humbler folk of a rural parish 
regard their clergyman, depends in a great degree upon 
his physical size ? A man six feet high will command 
greater reverence than one of five feet six ; but if the man 
of five feet six in height be six feet in circumference, 
then he will command greater reverence than the man of 
six feet in height, provided the latter be thin. And after 
great reflection, I am led to the conclusion, that the true 
cause of this bucolic dignity does not abide in mere size. 
Dignity, even in the country, is not in direct proportion 
to extension, as such. No; it is in direct propor- 
tion to that slowness of movement which comes of solid 
extension. A man who walks very fast is less dignified 
than a man who walks very slow ; and that which con- 
duces to the slow, ponderous, measured step, is a valuable 
accessory to personal dignity. But the connection is not 
so essential as the unthinking might conclude between 
personal dignity and personal bulk. Now, the composi- 
tion, whether written or spoken, of some men, is (so to 
speak) a display of mental agility. It is the result of 
rapid mental movements, you can see. Not with massive 
heaves and sinkings, like the engines of an ocean steam- 
ship, did the mental machinery play that turned off such 
a book, such a speech, such an essay ; but rather with 
rapid jerkings of little cranks, and invisible whirlings of 



CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 401 

little wheels. And the thing manufactured is pretty, not 
grand. It is very nice. You conclude that as the big 
steam-engine cannot play very fast, so the big mind too. 
The mind that can go at a tremendous pace, you conclude 
to be a little mind. The mind that can skip about, you 
conclude cannot be a massive mind. There are truth and 
falsehood in your conclusion. Very great minds, guided 
by very comprehensive views, have with lightning-like 
promptitude rushed to grand decisions and generaliza- 
tions. But it cannot be denied that ponderous machinery, 
physical and mental, generally moves slowly. And in 
the mental world, many folk readily suppose that the ma- 
chinery which moves slowly is certainly ponderous. A 
man who gets up to speak in a deliberative assembly, and 
with a deep voice from an extensive chest, and inscruta- 
ble meaning depicted on massive features, slowly states 
his views, with long pauses between the members of his 
sentences, and very long pauses between his sentences, 
will by many people be regarded as making a speech 
which is very heavy metal indeed. Possibly it may be ; 
possibly it may not. I ought to say, that the most telling 
deliberative speaker I ever heard, speaks in that slow 
fashion. But when he speaks on an important subject 
which interests him, every deliberate word goes home 
like a cannon-ball. Pie speaks in eighty-four pounders. 
But I have heard men as slow, who spoke in large soap- 
bubbles. And of all lightness of thought, deliver us from 
ponderous lightness ! Nothings are often excusable, and 
sometimes pleasing ; but pompous nothings are always 
execrable. I have known men who, morally speaking, 
gave away tickets for very inferior parish soup with the 
air of one freely dispensing invitations to the most sump- 
tuous banquet that ever was provided by mortal. Oh ! 
26 



402 CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 

to Stick in a skewer, and see the great wind-bag col- 
lapse ! 

You do not respect the jackpndding who amuses you, 
though he may amuse you remarkably well. The more 
you laugh at him, the less you respect him. And, to the 
vulgar apprehension, any man who amuses you, or who 
approaches towards amusing you, or who produces any- 
thing which interests you (which is an approximation 
towards amusing you), will be regarded as, quoad hoc, 
approaching undignifiedly in the direction of the jack- 
pudding. The only way in which to make sure that not 
even the vulgarest mind shall discern this approximation, 
is to instruct while you' carefully avoid interesting, and 
still more amusing, even in the faintest degree. Even 
wise men cannot wholly divest themselves of the preju- 
dice. You cannot but feel an inconsistency between the 
ideas of Mr. Disraeli writing Henrietta Temple, and Mr. 
Disraeli leading the House of Commons. You feel that 
somehow it costs an effort to feel that there is nothing un- 
befitting when the author of The Caxtons becomes a 
secretary of state. You fancy, at the first thought, that you 
would have had greater confidence in some sound, steady, 
solid old gentleman, who never amused or interested you 
in any way. The office to be filled is a dignified one ; 
and how can a man befit a dignified office who has inter- 
ested and amused you so much ? 

But the consideration which above all others leads the 
sober majority of mankind to respect and value decent 
and well-conducted dulness, is the consideration of the 
outrageous practical folly, and the insufferable wicked- 
ness, which many men of genius appear to have regarded 
it their prerogative to indulge in. You can quite under- 
stand how plain, sensible people may abhor an eccentric 



CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 403 

genius, and wish rather for sound principle and sound 
sense. And probably most men whose opinion is of much 
value, would be thankful to have decent dulness in their 
nearest relations, rather than the brilliant aberrations of 
such men as Shelley, Byron, and Coleridge. Give us the 
plain man who will do his work creditably in life ; who 
will support his children and pay his debts ; rather than 
the very clever man who fancies that his cleverness sets 
him free from all the laws which bind commonplace mor- 
tals ; who does not think himself called upon to work for 
his bread, but sponges upon industrious men, or howls out 
because the nation will not support him in idleness ; who 
wonders at the sordid tradesman who asks him to pay for 
the clothes he wears, and leaves his children to be edu- 
cated by any one who takes a fancy for doing so ; who 
violates all the dictates of common morality and common 
prudence, and blasphemes because he gets into trouble by 
doing so ; who will not dress, or eat, or sleep like other 
men ; who wears round jackets to annoy his wife, and 
scribbles Atheist after his name in traveller's books ; and 
in brief, who is distinguished by no characteristic so 
marked as the entire absence of common sense. I think, 
reader, that if you were sickened by a visit of a month's 
duration from one of these geniuses you would resolve 
that for the remainder of your life only dull, commonplace, 
respectable mortals should ever come under your roof. 
Let us be thankful that the days in which high talent 
was generally associated with such eccentricities are 
happily passing away. Clever men are now content to 
dress, look, and talk like beings of this world ; and above 
all, they appear to understand that however clever a man 
may be, that is no reason why he should not pay his butch- 
er's bill. How fine a character was that of Sir Walter 



404 CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 

Scott combining homely sense with great genius ! And 
how different from the hectic, morbid, unprincipled, and 
indeed blackguard mental organization of various brilliant 
men of the last age, was Shakspeare's calm and well- 
balanced mind ! It is only the second-rate genius who is 
eccentric, and only the tenth-rate Avho is unintelligible. 

But if one is driven to a warm sympathy with the 
humdrum and decently dull, by contemplating the ab- 
surdities and vagaries of men of real genius, even more 
decidedly is that result produced by contemplating the 
ridiculous little curvetings and prancings of affectedly 
eccentric men of no genius. You know, my reader, the 
provincial celebrity of daily life ; you know what a nui- 
sance he is. You know how almost every little country 
town in Britain has its eminent man — its man of letters. 
He has written a book, or it is whispered that he writes 
in certain periodicals, and simple human beings, who 
know nothing of proof-sheets, look upon him with a cer- 
tain awe. He varies in age and appearance. If young, 
he wears a moustache and long, dishevelled hair ; if old, 
a military cloak, which he disposes in a brigand form. 
He walks the street with an abstracted air, as though his 
thoughts were wandering beyond the reach of the throng. 
He is fond of solitude, and he gratifies his taste by going 
to the most frequented places within reach, and there as- 
suming a look of rapt isolation. Sometimes he may be 
seen to gesticulate wildly, and to dig his umbrella into the 
pavement as though it were a foeman's breast. Occa- 
sionally moody laughter may be heard to proceed from 
him, as from one haunted by fearful thoughts. His fat 
and rosy countenance somewhat belies the anguish which 
is preying upon his vitals. He goes much to tea-parties, 
where he tells the girls that the bloom of life has gone for 



CONCERNING THE DIGNITY OF DULNESS. 405 

him, and drops dark hints of the mental agony he en- 
dures in reviewing his earlier life. He bids them not to 
ask what is the grief that consumes him, but to be thank- 
ful that they do not, cannot know. He drops hints 
how the spectres of the past haunt him at the midnight 
hour : how conscience smites him with chilly hand for his 
youthful sins. The truth is that he was always a very 
quiet lad, and never did any harm to anybody. Occa- 
sionally, when engaged in conversation with some one on 
whom he wishes to make an impression, he exclaims, 
suddenly, ' Hold ! let me register that thought.' He 
pauses for a minute, gazing intently on the heavens ; then 
exclaims, ''Tis done!' and takes up the conversation 
where it was interrupted. He fancies that his compan- 
ion thinks him a great genius. His companion, in fact, 
thinks him a poor silly fool. 

And now, my friend, turning away from these matters, 
let us sit down on this large stone, warm in the April sun- 
shine, by the river side. Swiftly the river glides away. 
The sky is bright blue, the water is crystal clear, and a 
soft wind comes through those budding branches. In the 
field on the other side I see a terrier and a cow. The 
terrier frisks about ; solemnly stands the cow. Let us 
think here for a while ; we need not talk. And for an ac- 
companiment to the old remembrances which such a day 
as this brings back, let us have the sound of that flowing 
river. 




CHAPTER XIII. 

CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 

WAS sitting, on a very warm and bright 
summer morning, upon a gravestone in the 
churchyard. It was a flat gravestone, ele- 
vated upon four little pillars, and covering 
the spot where sleeps the mortal part of a venerable cler- 
gyman who preceded me in my parish, and who held the 
charge of it for sixty years. I had gone down to the 
churchyard, as usual, for a while after breakfast, with a 
little companion, who in those days was generally with 
me wherever I went. And while she was walking about, 
attended by a solemn dog, I sat down in the sunshine on 
the stone, gray with lichen, and green with moss. I 
thought of the old gentleman wlio had slept below for fifty 
years. I wondered if he had sometimes come to the 
churchyard after breakfast before he began his task of 
sermon-writing. I reflected how his heart, mouldered 
into dust, was now so free from all the little heats and 
worries which will find their way into even the quietest 
life in this world. And sitting there, I put my right hand 
upon the mossy stone. The contrast of the hand upon the 
green surface caught the eye of my companion, who was 
not four years old. She came slowly up, and laid down her 
own hand beside mine on the mossy expanse. And after 



CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 407 

looking at it in various ways for several minutes, and con- 
trasting her own little hand with the weary one which is 
now writing this page, she asked, thoughtfully and doubt- 
fully, — Was your hand ever a little hand like mine ? 

Yes, I said, as I spread it out on the stone, and looked 
at it : it seems a very short time since that was a little 
hand like yours. It was a fat little hand: not the 
least like those thin fingers and many wrinkles now. 
When it grew rather bigger, the fingers had generally 
various deep cuts, got in making and rigging ships : those 
were the days when I intended to be a sailor. It grad- 
ually grew bigger, as all little hands will do, if spared in 
this world. And now, it has done a great many things. 
It has smoothed the heads of many children, and the 
noses of various liorses. It has travelled, I thought to 
myself, along thousands of written pages. It has paid 
away money, and occasionally received it. In many things 
that hand has fallen short, I thought ; yet several things 
which that hand found to do, it did with its might. 
So here, I thought, were three hands, not far apart. 
There was the little hand of infancy ; four daisies were 
lying near it on the gravestone where it was laid down 
to compare with mine. Then the rather skinny and not 
very small hand, which is doing now the work of life. 
And a couple of yards beneath, there was another hand, 
whose work was over. It was a hand which had written 
many sermons, preached in that plain church ; which had 
turned over the leaves of the large pulpit-Bible (very 
old and shabby) which I turn over now ; which had of- 
ten opened the door of the house where now I live. And 
when I got up from the gravestone, and was walking 
quietly homev/ard, many thoughts came into my mind 
Concerning Growing Old. 



408 CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 

And, indeed, many of the most affecting thoughts which 
can ever enter the human mind are concerning the lapse 
of Time, and the traces which its lapse leaves upon hu- 
man beings. There is something that touches us in the 
bare thought of Growing Old. I know a house on cer- 
tain of whose walls there hang portraits of members of 
the family for many years back. It is not a grand house, 
where, to simple minds, the robes of brocade and the 
suits of armour fail to carry home the idea of real human 
beings. It is the house of a not wealthy gentleman. 
The portraits represent people whose minds did not run 
much upon deep speculations or upon practical pohtics ; 
but who, no doubt, had many thoughts as to how they 
should succeed in getting the ends to meet. With such 
people does the writer feel at home : with such, probably, 
does the majority of his readers. I remember, there, the 
portrait of a frail old lady, plainly on the furthest con- 
fines of life. More than fourscore years had left their 
trace on the venerable head : you could fancy you saw 
the aged hands shaking. Opposite there hung the pic- 
ture of a blooming girl, in the fresh May of beauty. The 
blooming girl was the mother of the venerable dame of 
fourscore. Painting catches but a glimpse of time ; but 
it keeps that glimpse. On the canvas the face never 
grows old. As Dekker has it, ' False colours last after 
the true be fled.' I have often 16oked at the two pictures, 
in a confused sort of reverie. If you ask what it is that 
I thought of in looking at them, I truly cannot tell you. 
The fresh young beauty was the mother : the aged grand- 
dame was the child : that was really all. But there are 
certain thoughts upon which you can vaguely brood for a 
long time. 

You remember reading how upon a day, not many 



CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 409 

years since, certain miners, working far under ground, 
came upon the body of a poor fellow who had perished 
in the suffocating pit forty years before. Some chemical 
agent, to which the body had been subjected — an agent 
prepared in the laboratory of nature — had effectually ar- 
rested the progress of decay. They brought it up to the 
surface : and for a while, till it crumbled away, through 
exposure to the atmosphere, it lay there, the image of a 
fine sturdy young man. No convulsion had passed 
over the face in death : the features were tranquil ; the 
hair was black as jet. No one recognized the face : a 
generation had grown up since the day on which the 
miner went down his shaft for the last time. But a tot- 
tering, old woman, who had hurried from her cottage at 
hearing the news, came up : and she knew again the face 
which through all these years she had never quite for- 
got. The poor miner was to have been her husband the 
day after that on which he died. They were rough peo- 
ple, of course, who were looking on : a liberal education 
and refined feelings are not deemed essential to the man 
whose work it is to get up coals, or even tin : but there 
were no dry eyes there when the gray-headed old pilgrim 
cast herself upon the youthful coi'pse, and poured out to 
its deaf ear many words of endearment, unused for forty 
years. It was a touching contrast : the one so ohl, the 
other so young. They had both been young, these long 
years ago: but time had gone on with the living, and 
stood still with the dead. It is difficult to account for the 
precise kind and degree of feeling with which we should 
have witnessed the little picture. I state the fact : I can 
say no more. I mention it in proof of my principle, that 
a certain vague pensiveness is the result of musing upon 
the lapse of time ; and a certain undetinable pathos of 



410 CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 

any incident which brings strongly home to us that lapse 
and its effects. 

' In silence Matthew lay, and eyed 

The spring beneath the tree : 
And thus the dear old man replied, 

The gray-haired man of glee : 

' " No check, no stay, that streamlet fears — 
How merrily it goes ? 
'Twill murmur on a thousand years, 
And flow as now it flows. 

' " And here, on this delightful day, 
I cannot choose but think 
How oft, a vigorous man, I lay 
Beside this fountain's brink. 

' " My eyes are dim with childish tears. 
My heart is idly stirred. 
For the same sound is in my ears 
Which in those days I heard." ' 

That is really the sum of what is to be said on the sub- 
ject. And it has always appeared to me that Mr. Dickens 
has shown an amount of philosophical insight which does 
not always characterize him, when he wrote certain reflec- 
tions, which he puts in the mouth of one Mr. Roker, who 
was a turnkey in the Fleet Prison. I do not know why it 
should be so ; but these words are to me more strikingly 
truthful tlian almost any others which the eminent author 
ever produced : — 

'"You remember Tom Martin, Neddy? Bless my dear eyes," 
said Mr. Roker, shaking his head slowly from side to side, and gazing 
abstractedly out of the grated window before him, as if he were fond- 
ly recalling some peaceful scene of his early youth, " it seems but yes- 
terday that he whopped the coal-heaver down at the Fox-under-the- 
Hill, by the wharf there. I think I can see him now, a coming up the 
Strand between two street-keepers, a little sobered by the bruising, 
with a patch o'winegar and brown paper over his right eyelid, and 
that 'ere lovely bull-dog, as pinned the little boy arterwards, a follow- 
ing at his heels. What arum thing Time is, aint it, Neddy? " ' 



CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 411 

Here we find, truthfully represented, an essential mood 
of the human mind. It is a more pleasing picture, per- 
haps, that comes back upon us in startling freshness, mak- 
ing us wonder if it is really so long ago since then, and 
our sentiment with regard to time is more elegantly ex- 
pressed ; but it really comes to this. You can say no 
more of time than that it is a strange, undefinable, inexpli- 
cable thing ; and when, by some caprice of memory, some 
long-departed scene comes vividly back, what more def- 
inite thing can you do than just shake your head, and 
gaze abstractedly, hke Mr. Roker? Like distant bells 
upon the breeze, some breath from childhood shows us 
plainly for a moment the little thing that was ourself. 
What more can you do but look at the picture, and feel 
that it is strange ? More important things have been for- 
gotten ; but you remember how, when you were four 
years old, you ran a race along a path with a green slope 
beside it, and watched the small shadow keeping pace 
with you along the green slope ; or you recall the precise 
feeling w^ith which you sat down in the railway carriage 
on the day when you first came home from school for the 
holidays, and felt the train glide away. And when these 
things return, what can you do but lean your head upon 
your hand, and vaguely muse and feel ? I have always 
much admired the truthful account of the small boy's 
fancies, as he sits and gazes into the glowing fire ' with 
his wee round face.' Mr. Ballantine is a true philoso- 
pher as well as a true poet. 

' For a' sae sage he looks, what can the hiddie ken V 
He's THiNKix' UPON NAETHiNG, like moiiy mighty men ! ' 

We can all ' think of naething,' and think of it for a 
long time, while yet the mind is by no means a blank. 
It is very easy, in one sense, to grow old. You have 



412 CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 

but to sit still and do nothing, and time passing over you 
will make you old. But to grow old wisely and genially, 
is one of the most difficult tasks to which a human being 
can ever set himself. It is very hard to make up your 
mind to it. Some men grow old, struggling and recalci- 
trating, dragged along against their will, clinging to each 
birthday as the drowning man catches at an overhanging 
bough. Some folk grow old, gracefully and fittingly. I 
think that, as a general rule, the people who least reluc- 
tantly grow old, are worthy men and women, who see 
their children growing up into all that is good and ad- 
mirable, with equal steps to those by which they feel 
themselves to be growing downward. A better, nobler, 
and happier self, they think, will take their place ; and in 
all the success, honour, and happiness of that new self, they 
can feel a purer and worthier pride than they ever felt 
in their own. But the human being who has no one to 
represent him when he is gone, will naturally wish to put 
off the time of his going as long as may be. It seems 
to be a difficult thing to hit the medium between clinging 
foolishly to youth and making an affected parade of age. 
Entire naturalness upon this subject appears to be very 
hard of attainment. You know how many people, men 
as well as women, pretend to be younger than they really 
are. I have found various motives lead to this pretence. 
I have known men, distinguished at a tolerably early age 
in some walk of intellectual exertion, who in announc- 
ing their age (which they frequently did without any 
necessity), were wont to deduct three or five years 
from the actual tale, plainly with the intention of 
making their talent and skill more remarkable, by 
adding the element of these being developed at a 
wonderfully early stage of life. They wished to be 



CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 413 

recognized as infant phenomena. To be an eloquent 
preacher is always an excellent thing ; but how much 
more wonderful if the preacher be no more than twenty- 
two or twenty-three. To repeat The Battle of Hohenlin- 
den is a worthy achievement, but the foolish parent pats 
his child's head with special exultation, as he tells you 
that his child, who has just repeated that popular poem, 
is no more than two years old. It is not improbable that 
the child's real age is two years and eleven months. It is 
very likely that the preacher's real age is twenty-eight. 
I remember hearing of a certain clerical person who, pre- 
suming on a very youthful aspect, gave himself out as 
twenty-four, when in fact he was thirty. 1 happened ac- 
cidentally to see the register of that individual's baptism, 
which took place five years before the period at which he 
said he was born. The fact of this document's existence 
was made known to the man, by way of correcting his 
singular mistake. He saw it ; but he clung to the fond 
delusion ; and a year or two afterwards I read with much 
amusement in a newspaper some account of a speech 
made by him, into which account was incorporated an as- 
surance that the speech was the more remarkable, inas- 
much as the youthful orator was no more than twenty- 
four ! Very, very contemptible, you say ; and I entirely 
agree with you. And apart from the dishonesty, I do 
not think that judicious people will value very highly the 
crude fruit which has been forced to a certain ripeness 
before its time. Let us have the mature thing. Give us 
intellectual beef rather than intellectual veal. In the do- 
main of poetry, great things have occasionally been done 
at a very early age ; for you do not insist upon sound and 
judicious views of life in poetry. For plain sense and 
practical guidance, you go elsewhere. But in every other 



414 CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 

department of literature, the value of a production is in 
direct proportion to the amount of the experience which it 
embodies. A man can speak with authority only of that 
which he has himself felt and known. A man cannot 
paint portraits till he has seen faces. And all feeling, 
and most moods of mind, will be very poorly described 
by one who takes his notion of them at second-hand. 
When you are very young yourself, you may read with 
sympathy the writings of very young men ; but when you 
have reached maturity, and learned by experience the 
details and realities of life, you will be conscious of a cer- 
tain indefinable want in such writings. And I do not 
know that this defect can be described more definitely 
than by saying that the entire thing is veal, not beef. 
You have the immature animal. You have the ' berries 
harsh and crude.' 

But long after the period at which it is possible to as- 
sume the position of the infant phenomenon, you still find 
many men anxious to represent themselves as a good deal 
younger than they are. To the population of Britain gen- 
erally, ten years elapse before one census is followed by the 
next ; but some persons, in these ten years, grow no more 
than two or three years older. Let me confess to an ex- 
treme abhorrence of such men. Their conduct affects me 
with an indescribable disgust. I dislike it more than 
many things which in themselves are probably more evil 
morally. Such men are, in the essential meaning of the 
word, humhugs. They are shams ; impostures ; false 
pretences. They are an embodied falsehood ; their very 
personality is a lie ; and you don't know what about them 
may next prove to be a deception. Looking at a man 
who says he is forty-three when in fact he is above sixty, 
I suspect him all over. I am in doubt whether his hair, 



CONCERNIXG GROWING OLD. 415 

his teeth, his eyes, are real. I do not know whether that 
breadth of chest be the developement of manly bone and 
muscle, or the skilful padding of the tailor. I am not 
sure how much is the man, and how much the work of his 
valet. I suspect that his whiskers and moustache are 
dyed. I look at his tight boots, and think how they 
must be tormenting his poor old corny feet. 1 admire 
his affected buoyancy of manner, and think how the mis- 
erable creature must collapse when he finds himself alone, 
and is no longer compelled by the presence of company 
to put himself on the stretch, and carry on that wretched 
acting. When I see the old reptile whispering in a cor- 
ner to a girl of eighteen, or furtively squeezing her in a 
waltz, I should like extremely to take him by the neck, 
and shake him till he came into the pieces of which he 
is made up. And when I have heard (long ago) such a 
one, with a hideous gloating relish telling a profane or in- 
decent story ; or instilling cynical and impious notions of 
life and things into the minds of young lads ; or (more 
disgusting still) using phrases of double meaning in the 
presence of innocent young women, and enjoying their 
innocent ignorance of his sense ; I have thought that I 
was beholding as degraded a phase of human nature as 
you will find on the face of this sinful world. O vener- 
able age, gray, wise, kindly, sympathetic ; before which I 
shall never cease reverently to bend, respecting even 
what I may (wrongly perhaps) esteem your prejudices ; 
that you should be caricatured and degraded in that foul, 
old leering satyr ! And if there be a thing on earth that 
disgusts one more than even the thought of the animal 
himself, it is to think of ministers of religion (prudently 
pious) who will wait meekly in his ante-chamber and sit 
humbly at his table, because he is an earl or a duke ! 



416 CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 

But though all this be so, there is a sense in which I 
interpret the clinging to youth, in which there is nothing 
contemptible about it, but much that is touching and 
pleasing. I abominate the padded, rouged, dyed old 
sham ; but I heartily respect the man or woman, pensive 
and sad, as some httle circumstance has impressed upon 
them the fact that they are growing old. A man or 
v/oman is a fool, who is indignant at being called the old 
lady or the old gentleman when these phrases state the 
truth; but there is nothing foolish or unworthy when 
some such occurrence brings it home to us, with some- 
thing of a shock, that we are no longer reckoned among 
the young, and that the innocent and impressionable days 
of childhood (so well remembered) are beginning to be 
far away. We are drawing nearer, we know, to certain 
solemn realities of which we speak much and feel little ; 
the undiscovered country (humbly sought through the 
pilgrimage of life) is looming in the distance before. We 
feel that hfe is not long, and is not commonplace, when 
it is regarded as the portal to eternity. And probably 
nothing will bring back the season of infancy and early 
youth upon any tlioughtful man's mind so vividly as the 
sense that he is growing old. How short a time since 
then ! You look at your great brown hand. It seems 
but yesterday since a boy-companion (gray now) tried to 
print your name upon the little paw, and there was not 
room. You remember it (is it five-and-twenty years 
since ?) as it looked when laid on the head of a friendly 
dog, two or three days before you found him poisoned and 
dead ; and helped, not without tears, to bury him in the 
garden under an apple-tree. You see, as plainly as if 
you saw it now, his brown eye, as it looked at you in life 
for the last time. And as you feel these things, you quite 



CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 417 

unaffectedly and sincerely put off, time after time, the 
period at which you will accept it as a fact, that you are 
old. Twenty-eight, tliirt}^ thirty-five, forty-eight, mark 
years on reaching which you will still feel yourself 
young ; many men honestly think that sixty-five or 
sixty-eight is the prime of life. A less amiable ac- 
companiment of this pleasing belief is often found in a 
disposition to call younger men (and not very young) 
hoys. I have heard that word uttered in a very spiteful 
tone, as though it were a name of great reproach. There 
are few epithets which I have ever heard applied in a 
manner betokening greater bitterness, than that of a clev- 
er lad. You remember how Sir Robert Walpole hurled 
the charge of youth against Pitt. You remember how 
Pitt (or Dr. Johnson for him) defended himself with 
great force of argument against the imputation. Possibly 
in some cases envy is at the root of the matter. Not 
every man has the magnanimity of Sir Bulwer Lytton, 
wdio tells us so frankly and so often how much he would 
like to be young again if he could. 

To grow old is so serious a matter, that it always ap- 
pears to me as if there were something like profanation 
in putting the fact or its attendant circumstances in a 
ludicrous manner. It is not a fit thing to joke about. A 
funny man might write a comic description of the way in 
which starving sailors on a raft used up their last poor 
allotments of bread and water, and watched with sinking 
hearts their poor stock decrease. Or he might record in 
a fashion that some people would laugh at, the gradual 
sinking of a family which had lost its means through 
degree after degree in the social scale, till the work- 
house was reached at last. But I do not think there is 
anything really amusing in the spectacle of a human 

27 



418 CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 

being giving up hold after hold to which he had clung, and 
sinking always lower and lower ; and there is no doubt 
that, in a physical sense, we soon come to do all that in 
the process of growing old. And though you may put 
each little mortification, each petty coming down, in a 
way amusing to bystanders, it should always be remem- 
bered that each may imply a severe pang on the part of 
the man himself. We smile when Mr. Dickens tells us 
concerning his hero, Mr. Tupman, that 

' Time and feeding had expanded that once romantic form ; the 
black silk waistcoat had become more and more developed ; inch by- 
inch had the gold watch-chain beneath it disappeared from within the 
range of Tupman's vision ; and gradually had the capacious chin en- 
croached upon the borders of the white cravat; but the soul of Tup- 
man had known no change.' 

Now, although Mr Tupman was an exceedingly fat 
man physically, and morally (to say the truth) a very 
great fool, you may rely upon it that as each little 
circumstance had occurred which his biographer has 
recorded, it would be a very serious circumstance in the 
feeling of poor Tupman himself. And this not nearly so 
much for the little personal mortification implied in each 
step of expanding bulk and lessening agility, but because 
each would be felt as a milestone, marking the progress 
of Tupman from his cradle to his grave. Each would 
be something to signify that the innocence and freshness 
of childhood were left so much further behind, and that 
the reality of life was growing more hard and prosaic. It 
is some feeling like this which makes it a sad thing to 
lay aside an old coat which one has worn for a long time. 
It is a decided step. Of course we all know that time 
goes on as fast when its progress is unmarked as when it 
is noted. And each day that the coat went on was an 



CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 419 

onward stage as truly as tlie day when the coat went off; 
but in this world we must take things as they are to our 
feelings : and there is something that very strongly ap- 
peals to our feeling in a decided beginning or a decided 
ending. Do not laugh, thoughtless folk, at the poor old 
maid, who persists in going bareheaded long after she 
ought to have taken to caps. You cannot knoAv how 
much further away that change would make her days of 
childhood seem : how much more remote and dim and 
faint it w^ould make the little life, the face, the voice of 
the young brother or sister that died when they both 
were children together. Do not fancy that it is mere 
personal vanity which prompts that clinging to apparent 
youth : feelings which are gentle, pure, and estimable 
may protest against any change from the old familiar 
way. Do not smile at the phrases of the house when 
there are gray-headed hoys, and girls on the lower side of 
forty-five : it would be a terrible sacrifice, it would make 
a terrible change, to give up the old names. You thought- 
less young people are ready to deride Mr. Smith when 
he appears in his new^ wig. You do not think how, when 
poor Smith went to Truelitt's to get it, he thought many 
thoughts of the long-departed mother, whom he remem- 
bers dimly on her sick-bed smoothing down her little 
boy's Iiair, thick enough then. And when you see Mr. 
Robinson putHng up the hill w^ith purpled face and labour- 
ing breath, do you think that poor Robinson does not 
remember the days when he was the best runner at 
school ? Perhaps he tells you at considerable length 
about these days. Well, listen patiently : some day you 
may be telling long stories too. There is a peculiar sad- 
ness in thinking of exertions of body or mind to which 
we were once equal, but to which we are not equal now. 
You remember the not very earnest Swift, conscious that 



420 CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 

the ' decay at the top ' had begun, bursting into tears as 
he read one of his early works, and exclaiming, ' Heav- 
ens, what a genius I had when I wrote that ! ' What is 
there more touching than the picture of poor Sir Walter, 
wheeled like a child in a chair through the rooms at 
Abbotsford, and suddenly exclaiming, ' Come, this is sad 
idleness,' and insisting on beginning to dictate a new tale, 
in which the failing powers of the great magician ap- 
peared so sadly, that large as its marketable value would 
have been, it never was suffered to appear in print. 
Probably the sense of enfeebled faculties is a sadder 
thing than the sense of diminished physical power. Prob- 
ably Sir Isaac Newton, in his later days, when he sat 
down to his own mathematical demonstrations, and could 
not understand them or follow them, felt more bitterly 
the wear of advancing time than the gray-headed High- 
lander sitting on a stone at his cottage door in the sun- 
shine, and teUing you how, long ago, he could breast the 
mountain with the speed of a deer ; or than the crippled 
soldier, w^ho leans upon his crutch, and tells how, many 
years ago, that shaky old hand had cut down the French 
cuirassier. But in either case it is a sad thing to think 
of exertions once put forth, and work once done, which 
could not be done or put forth now. Change for the 
worse is always a sorrowful thing. And the aged man, 
in the respect of physical power, and the capacity for in- 
tellectual exertion, has * seen better days.' You do not 
like to think that in any respect you are falling off. 
You are not pleased at being told that ten years ago you 
wrote a plainer hand or spoke in a rounder voice. It is 
mortifying to find that whereas you could once walk at 
five miles an hour, you can now accomplish no more than 
three and a half. Now, in a hundred ways, at every 
turn, and by a host of little wounding facts, we ai'e com- 



CONCERNIXG GROWING OLD. 421 

pelled to feel as we grow old that we are falling off. As 
the complexion roughens, as the hair thins off, as we 
come to stoop, as we blow tremendously if we attempt to 
run, the man of no more than middle age is conscious of 
a bodily decadence. And advancing years make the 
wise man sadly conscious of a mental decadence too. Let 
us be thankful that if physical and intellectual decHne 
must come at a certain stage of growing old, there are 
respects in which, so long as we live, we may have the 
comfort of thinking that we are growing better. The 
higher nature may daily be reaching a nobler develop- 
ment ; when ' heart and flesh faint and fail,' when the 
clay tenement is turning frail and shattered, the better 
part within may show in all moral grace as but a little 
lower than the angels. Age need not necessarily be 
' dark and unlovely,' as Ossian says it is ; and the convic- 
tion that in some respect, that in the most important of 
all respects, we are growing better, tends mightily to strip 
age of that sense of falling off which is the bitterest thing 
about it. And as the essential nature of growing old ; — 
its essence as a sad thing ; — lies in the sense of deca- 
dence, the conviction that in almost anything we are 
gaining ground has a wonderful power to enable us cheer- 
fully to grow old. A man will contentedly grow fatter, 
balder, and puffier, if he feels assured that he is pushing 
on to eminence at the bar or in politics ; and if he takes 
his seat upon the woolsack even at the age of seventy- 
five, thouo-h he mif>;ht now seek in vain to climb the trees 
he climbed in youth, or to play at leapfrog as then, still 
he is conscious that his life on the whole has been a 
progress ; that he is on the whole better now than he was 
in those days which were his best days physically ; that 
to be lord chancellor, albeit a venerable one, is, as the 



422 CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 

world goes, a more eminent thing than to be the gayest 
and most active of midshipmen. And so on the whole 
he is content to grow old, because he feels that in grow- 
ing he has not on the whole been coming down hilh 

The supremely mortifying thing is, to feel that the 
physical decadence which comes with growing old, is not 
counterbalanced by any improvement whatsoever. We 
shall not mind much about growing less agile and less 
beautiful, if we think that we are growing wiser and bet- 
ter. The gouty but wealthy merchant, who hobbles with 
difficulty to his carriage, feels that after all he has made 
an advance upon those days in which, if free from gout, 
he wa>^ devoid of pence ; and if he did not hobble, he 
had no carriage into which he might get in that awkward 
manner. The gray-haired old lady who was a beauty 
once, is consoled for her growing old, if in her age she is 
admitted to the society of the county, while in- her youth 
she was confined to the society of the town. Make us 
feel that we are better in something, and we shall be con- 
tent to be worse in many things ; but it is miserable to 
think that in all things we are falling oif, or even in all 
things standing still. A man would be very much mor- 
tified to think that at fifty he did not write materially 
better sermons, essays, or articles than he did at five-and- 
twenty. In many things he knows the autumn of life is 
a falling-ofF from its spring-time. He has ceased to 
dance ; his voice quavers abominably when he tries to 
sing ; he has no fancy now for climbing hills, and he 
shirks walks of forty miles a day. Perhaps deeper wrin- 
kles have been traced by time on the heart than on the 
forehead, and the early freshness of feeling is gone. But 
surely, in mellowed experience, in sobered and sound 
views of things, in tempered expectations, in patience, in 



CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 423 

sympathy, in kindly charity, in insight into God's ways 
and deahngs, he is better now a thousand times than he 
was tljen. He has worked his way through the liectic 
stage in which even abh^ and thoughtful men fancy that 
Byron was a great poet. A sounder judgment and a 
severer taste direct him now ; in all things, in short, that 
make the essence of the manly nature, he is a better and 
furtlier advanced man than he ever was before. The 
physical nature says, by many little signs, we are go- 
ing DOWN HILL ; the spiritual nature testifies by many 
noble gains and acquirements, we are going onward 
AND UPWARD ! It sccms to me that the clergyman's state 
of feeling must be a curious one, who, on a fine Sunday 
morning, when he is sixty, can take out of his drawer a 
sermon which he wrote at five-and-twenty, and go and 
preach it with perfect approval and without the altera- 
tion of a word. It is somewhat mortifying, no doubt, to 
look at a sermon which you wrote seven or eight years 
since, and which you then thought brilliant eloquence, and 
to find that in your present judgment it is no better than 
tawdry fustian. But still, my friend, even though you 
grudge to find that you must throw the sermon aside and 
preach it no more, are you not secretly pleased at this 
proof how much your mind has grown in these years ? It 
is pleasant to think that you have not been falling off, not 
standing still. The wings of your imagination are some- 
what clipped indeed, and your style has lost something of 
that pith which goes with want of consideration. Some 
youthful judges may think that you have sadly fallen off; 
but you are content in the firm conviction that you have 
vastly improved. It was veal then : it is beef now. I 
remember hearing with great interest how a venerable 
professor of fourscore wrote in the last few weeks of his 



424 CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 

life a little course of lectures on a certain debated point 
of theology. He had outgrown his former notions upon 
the subject. The old man said his former lectures upon 
it did not do him justice. Was it not a pleasant sight — 
the aged tree bearing fruit to the last ? How it must 
have pleased and soothed the good man amid many 
advancing infirmities to persuade himself (justly or un- 
justly) that in the most important respect he was going 
onward still ! 

It is indeed a pleasant sight to kindly onlookers, and 
it is a sustaining and consoling thing to the old man 
himself, when amid physical decadence there is intellect- 
ual growth. But this is not a common thing. As a 
general rule it cannot be doubted that, intellectually, we 
top the summit sometime before fourscore, and begin 
to go down hill. I do not wish to turn my essays into 
sermons ; or to push upon my readers in Fraser things 
more fitly addressed to my congregation on Sundays : 
still, let me say that in the thought that growing old 
implies at last a decay both mental and bodily, and that 
unrelieved going down is a very sad thing to feel or to 
see, I find great comfort in remembering that as regards 
the best and noblest of all characteristics, the old man 
may be progressing to the last. In all those beautiful 
qualities which most attract the love and reverence of 
those around, and which fit for purer and happier com- 
pany than can be found in this world, the aged man or 
woman may be growing still. In the last days, indeed, 
it may be ripening rather than growing : mellowing, not 
expanding. But to do that is to * grow in grace.' And 
doubtless the yellow harvest-field in September is an 
advance upon the fresh green blades of June. You 
may like better to look upon the wheat that is pro- 



CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 425 

gressing towards ripeness ; but the wheat which has 
reached ripeness is not a falhng off. The stalks will 
not bend now, without breaking: you rub the heads, 
and the yellow chaff that wraps the grain, crumbles off 
in dust. But it is beyond a question that there you 
see wheat at its best. 

Still, not forgetting this, we must all feel it sad to see 
human beings as they grow old, retrograding in mate- 
rial comforts and advantages. It is a mournful thing 
to see : a man grower poorer as he is growing older, or 
losing position in any way. If it were in my power, I 
would make all barristers, above sixty, judges. They 
ought to be put in a situation of dignity and indepen- 
dence. You don't like to go into a court of justice, and 
there behold a thin, gray-headed counsel, somewhat 
shaken in nerve, looking rather frail, battling away with 
a full-blooded, confident, hopeful, impudent fellow, five- 
and-twenty years his junior. The youthful, big-whis- 
kered, roaring, and bullying advocate is sure to be held 
in much the greater estimation by attorney's clerks. 
The old gentleman's day is over ; but with lessening 
practice and disappointed hopes he must drive on at the 
bar still. I wish I were a chief justice, that by special 
deference and kindliness of manner, I might daily soothe 
somewhat the feelings of that aging man. But it is 
especially in the case of the clergy that one sees the 
painful sight of men growing poorer as they are grow- 
ing older. I think of the case of a clergyman who at 
his first start was rather fortunate : who gets a nice 
parish at six-and-twenty : I mean a parish which is a 
nice one for a man of six-and-twenty : and who never 
gets any other preferment, but in that parish grows old. 
Don't we all know how pretty and elegant everything 



426 CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 

was about him at first : how trim and weedless were his 
garden and shrubbery : how rosy his carpets, how airy 
his window-curtains, how neat though shght all his fur- 
niture: how graceful, merry, and nicely dressed the 
young girl who was his wife : how (besides hosts of 
parochial improvements) he devised numberless little 
changes about his dwelling : rustic bowers, moss-houses, 
green mounts, labyrinthine walks, fantastically trimmed 
yews, root-bridges over the little stream. But as his 
family increased, his income stood still. It was hard 
enough work to make the ends meet even at first, 
though young hearts are hopeful : but with six or seven 
children, with boys who must be sent to college, with 
girls who must be educated as ladies, with the prices of 
all things ever increasing, with multiplying bills from 
the shoemaker, tailor, dressmaker ; the poor parson 
grows yearly poorer. The rosy face of the young wife 
has now deep lines of care : the weekly sermon is dull 
and spiritless : the parcel of books comes no more : the 
carpets grow threadbare but are not replaced : the fur- 
niture becomes creaky and rickety : the garden walks 
are weedy : the bark peels off the rustic verandah : the 
mosshouse falls much over to one side : the friends, far 
away, grow out of all acquaintance. The parson himself, 
once so precise in dress, is shabby and untidy now ; 
and his wife's neat figure is gone : the servants are of 
inferior class, coarse and insolent : perhaps the burden 
of hopeless debt presses always with its dull, dead 
weight upon the poor clergyman's heart. There is lit- 
tle spring in him to push off the invasion of fatigue 
and infection, and he is much exposed to both ; and 
should he be taken away, who shall care for the widow 
and the fatherless, losing at once their head, their home, 



CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 427 

their means of living ? Even you, non-clerical reader, 
know precisely what I describe : hundreds have seen it : 
and such will agree with nie when I say that there is 
no sadder sight than that of a clergyman, with a wife 
and children, growing poor as he is growing old. Oh, 
that I had the fortune of John Jacob Astor, that I midit 
found, once for all, a fund that should raise forever 
above penury and degradation the widows and the 
orphans of rectory, vicarage, parsonage, and manse ! 

And even when the old man has none depending upon 
him for bread, to be provided from his lessening store, 
there is something inexpressibly touching and mournful 
in the spectacle of an old man who must pinch and screw. 
You do not mind a bit about a hopeful young lad having 
to live in humble lodgings up three pair of stairs ; or 
about such a one having a limited number of shirts, 
stockings, and boots, and needing to be very careful and 
saving as to his clothes ; or about his having very homely 
shaving-things, or hair-brushes which are a good deal 
worn out. The young fellow can stand all that : it is all 
quite right : let him bear the yoke in his youth : he may 
look forward to better days. Nor does there seem in 
the nature of things any very sad inconsistency in the 
idea of a young lad carefully considering how long his 
boots or great coat will last, or with what minimum of 
shirts he can manage to get on. Vmi I cannot bear the 
thought of a gray-headed old man, with shaky hand and 
weary limb, sitting down in his lonely lodging, and 
meditating on such things as these : counting his pocket- 
handkerchief"^, and suspecting that one is stolen ; or 
looking ruefully at a boot whicli has been cut where 
the upper leather joins the sole. Let not the aged man 
be worried with such petty details ! Of course, my 



428 CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 

reader, I know as well as you do, that very many aged 
people must think of these things to the last. All I say 
is, that if I had the ordering of things, no man or 
woman above fifty should ever know the want of money. 
And whenever I find a four-leaved shamrock, that is 
the very first arrangement I shall make. Possibly I 
may extend the arrangement further, and provide that 
no honest married man or woman shall ever grow early 
old through wearing care. What a little end is some- 
times the grand object of a human being's strivings 
through many weeks and months ! I sat down the 
other day in a poor chamber, damp with much linen 
drying upon crossing lines. There dwells a solitary 
woman, an aged and infirm woman, who supports herself 
by washing. For months past her earnings have aver- 
aged three shillings a week. Out of that sum she must 
provide food and raiment ; she must keep in her poor 
fire, and she must pay a rent of nearly three pounds a 
year. ' It is hard work, sir,' she said : ' it costs me 
many a thought getting together the money to pay my 
rent.' And I could see well, that from the year's 
beginning to its end, the thing always uppermost in 
that poor old widow's waking thoughts, was the raising 
of that great incubus of a sum of money. A small 
end, you would say, for the chief thoughts of an im- 
mortal being ! Don't you feel, gay young reader, for 
that fellow-creature, to whom a week has been a suc- 
cess, if at its close she can put by a few halfpence 
towards meeting the term day? Would you not like 
to enrich her, to give her a light heart, by sending her 
a half-sovereign ? If you would, you may send it 
to me. 

It is well, I have said, for a man who is growing old. 



CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 429 

if he is able to persuade himself that though physically 
going downhill, he is yet in some respect progressing. 
For if he can persuade himself that he is progressing 
in any one thing, he will certainly believe that he is 
advancing on the whole. Still, it must be said, that the 
self-complacency of old gentlemen is sometimes amusing 
(where not irritating) to their juniors. The self-conceit 
of many old men is something quite amazing. They 
talk incessantly about themselves and their doings ; and, 
to hear them talk, you would imagine that every great 
social or political change of late years had been brought 
about mainly by their instrumentality. I have heard an 
elderly man of fair average ability, declare in sober 
earnest, that had he gone to the bar, he * had no hesi- 
tation in saying' that he would have been chancellor or 
chief justice of England. I have witnessed an elderly 
man whom the late Sir Eobert Peel never saw or heard 
of, declare that Sir Robert had borrowed from him his 
idea of abolishing the Corn-laws. I have heard an 
elderly mercantile man, who had gone the previous day 
to look at a small property which was for sale, remark 
that he had no doubt that by this time all the country 
was aware of what he had been doing. With the ma- 
jority of elderly men, you can hardly err on the side of 
over-estimating the amount of their vanity. They will 
receive with satisfaction a degree of flattery which would 
at once lead a young man to suspect you were making 
a fool of him. There is no doubt that if a man be fool- 
ish at all, he always grows more foolish as he grows 
older. The most outrageous conceit of personal beauty, 
intellectual prowess, weight in the county, superiority in 
the regard of horses, wine, pictures, grapes, potatoes, 
poultry, pigs, and all other possessions, which I have 



430 CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 

ever seen, has been in the case of old men. And I 
have known commonplace old women, to whom if you 
had ascribed queenly beauty and the intellect of Shak- 
speare, they would have thought you were doing them 
simple justice. The truth appears to be, not that the 
vanity of elderly folk is naturally bigger than that of 
their juniors, but that it is not mown down in that un- 
sparing fashion to which the vanity of their juniors is 
subjected. If an old man tells you that the abolition of 
the slave-trade originated in his back-parlor, you may 
think him a vain, silly old fellow, but you do not tell 
him so. Whereas if a young person makes an exhibi- 
tion of personal vanity, he is severely ridiculed. He is 
taught sharply that, however great may be his estimate 
of himself, it will not do to show it. ' Shut up, old 
fellow, and don't make a fool of yourself,' you say to a 
friend of your own age, should he begin to vapour. But 
when the aged pilgrim begins to boast, you feel bound 
to listen with apparent respect. And the result is, that 
the old gentleman fancies you believe all he tells you. 

Not unfrequently, when a man has grown old to that 
degree that all his powers of mind and body are con- 
siderably impaired, there is a curious and touching mood 
which comes before an almost sudden breaking-down 
into decrepitude. It is a mood in which the man be- 
comes convinced that he is not so very old ; that he has 
been mistaken in fancying that the autumn of life was 
so far advanced with him ; and that all he has to do in 
order to be as active and vigorous as he ever was, is to 
make some great change of scene and circumstances : 
to go back, perhaps, to some place where he had lived 
many years before, and there, as Dr. Johnson expresses 
it, to ' recover youth in the fields where he once was 



CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 431 

young.' Tlie aged clergyman tliinks that if he were 
now to go to the parish he was offered forty years since, 
it would bring back those days again : he would be the 
man he was then. Of course, in most cases, such a 
feeling is like the leaping up of the flame before it goes 
out ; it is an impulse as natural and as unreasonable as 
that which makes the dying man insist within an hour of 
his death on being lifted from his bed and placed in his 
easy-chair, and then he will be all right. But some- 
times there really is in human feeling and life something 
analogous to the Martinmas summer in the year. Some- 
times after we had made up our mind that we had 
grown old, it flashes upon us that we are not old after 
all : there is a real rejuvenescence. Happy days pro- 
mote the feeling. You know that as autumn draws on, 
there come days on which it is summer or winter just 
as the weather chances to be fair or foul. And so there 
is a stage of life in which it depends mainly on a man's 
surroundings whether he shall be old or young. If un- 
successful, over-burdened, over-driven, lightly esteemed, 
wath much depending upon him, and little aid or sym- 
pathy, a man may feel old at thirty-five. But if there 
still be a house where he is one of the hoys : if he be 
living among his kindred and those who have grown up 
along with him : if he be still unmarried : if he have 
not lived in many different places, or in any place 
very far away : if he have not known many different 
modes of life, or worked in many kinds of w^ork: 
then at thirty-five he may feel very young. There 
are men who at that age have never known what 
it is to stand upon their own legs in life, and to act 
upon their own responsibility. They have always had 
some one to tell them what to do. I can imagine 



432 CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 

that towards the close of the ten years which Pisis- 
tratus Caxton spent in Australia, far away from his 
parents and his home, and day by day obliged to decide 
and to manage for himself, he had begun to feel toler- 
ably old. But when he came back again, and found his 
father and mother hardly changed in aspect ; and found 
the chairs, and sofas, and beds, and possibly even the 
carpets, looking much as he had left them ; those ten 
years, a vast expanse while they were passing over, 
would close up into something very small in the per- 
spective ; and he would feel with a sudden exultation 
that he was quite a young fellow yet. 

It is wonderful what a vast amount of work a man 
may go through without its telling much upon him : 
and how many years he may live without feeling per- 
ceptibly older at their close. The years were long in 
passing ; they look like nothing when past. If you 
were to go away, my friend, from London or Edinburgh, 
and live for five or six years in the centre of the Libyan 
desert ; or in an island of the South Seas ; or at an 
up-country station in India ; there would be many even- 
ings in those years on which you would feel as though 
you were separated by ages from the scenes and friends 
you knew. It would seem like a century since you 
came away ; it would seem like an impossibility that 
you should ever be back again in the old place, looking 
and feeling much in the old way. But at length travel- 
ling on week after week, you come home again. You 
find your old companions looking just as before, and the 
places you knew are little changed. Miss Smith a 
blooming young woman before you went out, is a bloom- 
ing young woman still, and probably singing the same 
songs which you remember her singing then. Why, it 



CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 433 

rushes upon you, you have been a very short time 
away ; you are not a day older ; it is a mere nothing to 
go out sperm-whaling for four or five years, or to retire 
for that period to a parish in the Ultima Thule. Life, 
after all, is so long, that you may cut a good large slice 
out of the earlier years of it without making it percepti- 
bly less. When Macaulay returned from India after 
his years there, I have no doubt he felt this. And the 
general principle is true, that almost any outward condi- 
tion or any state of feeling, after it has passed away, 
appears to us to have lasted a very much shorter time 
than it did when it was passing ; and it leaves us with 
the conviction that we are not nearly so old as we had 
fancied wiiile it was passing. And the rejuvenescence 
is sometimes not merely in feeling, but in fact and in 
appearance. Have you not known a lady of perhaps 
three and thirty years married to an ugly old fogy of 
eighty-five, who, during the old fogy's life wore high 
dresses, and caps, that she might appear something like 
a suitable match for the old fogy ; but who instantly the 
ancient buffalo departed this life, cast aside her ven- 
erable trappings, and burst upon the world almost as a 
blooming girl, doubtless to her own astonishment no less 
than to that of her friends ? And you remember that 
pleasing touch of nature in the new series of Friends in 
Council, when Milverton, after having talked of himself 
as a faded widower, and appeared before us as one de- 
voted to grave philosophic research, falls in love with a 
girl of two-and-twenty, and discovers that after all he is 
not so old. And I suppose it would be a pleasant dis- 
covery to any man, after he had fancied for years that 
the romantic interest had for him fled from life, to find 
that music could still thrill through him as of yore, 



434 CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 

and that the capacity of spooniness was not at all oblit- 
erated. As Festus says, 

' Rouse thee, heart ! 
Bow of my life, thou yet art full of spring ! 
My quiver still hath many purposes.' 

When Sir Philip Sidney tells us that in walking 
through the fields of his Arcadia, you would, among 
other pleasant sights and sounds, here and there chance 
upon a shepherd boy, ' piping as if he would never grow 
old,' you find the chivalrous knight giving his counte- 
nance to the vulgar impression that youth is a finer 
thing than age. And you may find among the Twice- 
told Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne a most exquisite one 
called The Fountain of Touth^ in which we are told of 
three old gentlemen and an old lady, who were so en- 
chanted by tasting a draught which brought back the 
exhilaration of youth for half an hour, (though it led 
them likewise to make very great fools of themselves,) 
that they determined they would wander over the world 
till they should find that wondrous fountain, and then 
quaff its waters morning, noon, and night. And Thomas 
Moore, in one of his sweetest songs, warms for a minute 
from cold glitter into earnestness, as he declares his 
belief that no gains which advancing years can bring 
with them are any compensation for the light-hearted- 
ness and the passionate excitement which they take 
away. He says, — 

' Ne'er tell me of glories serenely adorning 

The close of our day, the calm eve of our night: 
Give me back, give me back the wild freshness of morning, — 
Its smiles and its tears are worth evening's best light.' 

And indeed it is to be admitted that in a life whose 
poetry is drawn from the domain of passion and iraag- 



CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 435 

ination, tlie poetry does pass away as imagination flag's 
and the capacity of emotion dries up with advancing 
time. But the true philosopher among the three writers 
who have been mentioned, is Mr. Hawthorne. He shows 
us how the exhihiration, the wild freshness of the season 
when life is at blood-heat, partakes of the nature of 
intoxication ; and he leaves us with the sober conviction 
that the truly wise man may well be thankful when he 
lias got safely through that feverish season of temptation 
and of folly. Let us be glad if our bark has come (even 
a little battered) through the Maelstrom, by the Scylla 
and Charybdis, and is now sailing quietly upon a calm 
and tranquil sea. Wait till you are a little older, youth- 
ful reader, and you will understand that truth and 
soberness (how fitly linked together) are noble things. 
If you are a good man — let me say it at once, a Chris- 
tian man — your latter days are better a thousand times 
than those early ones after which superficial and worldly 
folk whimper. The capacity of excitement is much 
lessened; the freshness of feeling and heart are much 
gone ; though not, of necessity, so very much. You 
begin, like the old grandmother in that exquisite poem 
of Mr. Tennyson, ' to be a little weary ; ' the morning 
air is hardly so exhilarating, nor the frosty winter after- 
noon ; the snowdrops and primroses come back, and you 
are disappointed that so little of tlie vernal joy comes 
with them ; you go and stand by the grave of your young 
sister on the anniversary of the day when she died, and 
you wonder that you have come to feel so little where 
once you felt so much. You preach the sermons you once 
preached with emotion so deep that it was contagious ; 
but now the corresponding feeling does not come ; you 
give them coldly ; you are mortified at the contrast 



436 CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 

between the warmth there is in the old words, and the 
chilliness with which you speak them. You hear of the 
death of a dear friend, and you are vexed that you can 
take it so coolly. But, O my brother, aging like myself, 
do you not know, in sober earnest, that for such losses 
as these, other things have brought abundant recom- 
pense ? What a meaning there is now to you in the 
words of St. Austin — 'Thou madst us for Thyself, and 
our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee ! ' 
You are beginning to understand that St. Paul was right, 
when (even in the face of the fact that inexperienced 
youth is proverbially the most hopeful) he declared that 
in the truest sense ' experience waketh hope.' What a 
calm there is here ! Passion is no longer the disturb- 
ino- force it once was. Your eyes are no longer blinded 
to the truth of things by the glittering mists of fancy. 
You do your duty quietly and hopefully. You can bear 
patiently with the follies and the expectations of youth. 
I say it with the firmest assurance of the truth of what I 
say, that as he grows old, the wise man has great reason 
to thank God that he is no longer young. Truth and 
soberness are well worth all they cost. You wont make 
a terrific fool of yourself any more. Campbell wa6 not 
a philosopher, and possibly he was only half in earnest 
when he wrote the following verse ; but many men, no 
longer young, will know how true it is : — 

' Hail, welcome tide of life, where no tumultuous billows roll. 
How wondrous to myself appears this halcyon calm of soul! 
The wearied bird blown o'er the deep would sooner quit its shore, 
Than I would cross the gulf again that Time has brought me o'erl ' 

The dead are the only people that never grow old. There 
was something typical in the arrestment of time in the case 
of the youthful miner, of whom we have already spoken. 



CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 437 

Your little brother or sister that died long ago remains in 
death and in remembrance the same young thing forever. 
It is fourteen years this evening since the writer's sister 
left this world. She was fifteen years old then — she is 
fifteen years old yet. I have grown older since then by 
fourteen years, but she has never changed as they ad- 
vanced ; and if God spares me to fourscore, I never shall 
think of her as other than tlie youthful creature she faded. 
The other day I listened as a poor woman told of the 
death of her first-born child. He was two years old. 
She had a small washing-green, across which was 
stretched a rope that came in the middle close to the 
ground. The boy was leaning on the rope, swinging 
backwards and forwards, and shouting with delight. 
The mother went into her cottajire and lost sisrht of him 
for a minute ; and when she returned the little man was ly- 
ing across the rope, dead. It had got under his chin : he 
had not sense to push it away ; and he was suffocated. 
The mother told me, and I believe truly, that she had 
never been the same person since ; but the thing which 
mainly struck me was, that though it is eighteen years 
since then, she thought of her child as an inftmt of two 
years yet : it is a little child she looks for to meet her at 
the gate of the Golden City. Had her child lived he 
would have been twenty years old now ; he died, and he 
is only two : he is two yet : he will never be more than 
two. The little rosy face of that morning, and the little 
half-articulate voice, would have been faintly remem- 
bered by the mother had they gradually died into boy- 
hood and manhood: but that day stereotyped them: they 
remain unchanged. 

Have you seen, my reader, the face that had grown 
old in life grow young after death? the expression of 

28* 



438 CONCERNING GROWING OLD. 

many years since, lost for long, come out startlingly in 
the features, fixed and cold ? Every one has seen it : 
and it is sometimes strange how rapidly the change takes 
place. The marks of pain fade out, and with them the 
marks of age. I once saw an aged lady die. She had 
borne sharp pain for many days with the endurance of a 
martyr ; she had to bear sharp pain to the very last. 
The features were tense and rigid with suffering ; they 
remained so while life remained. It was a beautiful sight 
to see the change that took place in the very instant of 
dissolution. The features, sharp for many days with pain, 
in that instant recovered the old aspect of quietude which 
they had borne in health : the tense, tight look was gone, 
you saw the signs of pain go out. You felt that all suf- 
fering was over. It was no more of course than the 
working of physical law : but in that case it seemed as if 
there were a further meaning conveyed. And so it 
seems to me when the young look comes back on the 
departed Christian's face. Gone, it seems to say, where 
the progress of time shall no longer bring age or decay. 
Gone where there are beings whose life may be reckoned 
by centuries, but in whom life is fresh and young, and al- 
ways will be so. Close the aged eyes ! Fold the aged 
hands in rest. Their owner is no longer old ! 



CONCLUSION. 



%^!M^^ ND such, my friendly reader, are my Rec- 
'J) REATiONS. It was pleasant to me, amid 
much work of a very different kind, to 
write these Essays. I trust that it has not 
been very tiresome for you to read them. 

There is a peculiar happiness which is known to the 
essayist. There is a virtue about his work to draw the 
sting from the little worries of life. If you fairly look some 
petty vexation of humanity in the face, and write an ac- 
count of it, it will never annoy you so much any more. It 
recurs : and it annoys you : but you have a latent feeling 
of satisfaction at finding how exactly accurate was your 
description of it; how completely your present sensation 
runs into the mould you had made. It is a curious thino-, 
too, that there is a certain pleasure in writing about a 
thing which was very unpleasant when it ha[)pened to one. 
You know how an artist makes a pleasing picture out 
of a poor cottage, in which it would be very disagreeable 
to live. You know how a great painter makes a picture, 
which you often like to look at, of an event at which you 
w^ould not have liked to have been present. You pause for 
a long time before the representation of some boors drink- 
ing ; or of a furious struggle in a guard-room ; or of a 
murdered man lying dead. Now, in fact, you would have 



440 CONCLUSION. 

got out of the way of such sights : the first two would 
have been disgusting : the last, at least a ' sorry sight.' 

It is not quite a case in point, that we look with great 
interest and pleasure at the representation of a sight 
which it would have been no worse than sad to see. 
Such a sight may have been elevating as well as sadden- 
ing. I see a figure laid upon a bed : you know it is stiff 
and cold. It is a female figure : there is the fixed but 
beautiful face. And through the open window I see in 
the west the summer sunset blazing, and the golden light 
falhng upon the pale features, and the closed eyes which 
will never open more till the sun has ceased to shine. I do 
not wonder that the exquisite genius of the painter fixed 
on such a scene, and preserved it with rigid accuracy, and 
wrote beneath his picture such words as these : 

The sun shall no more be thy light by day; neither for brightness 
shall the moon give light unto thee: but the Lord shall be unto thee 
an everlasting light, and thy God thy gloiy. 

Thy sun shall no more go down ; neither shall thy moon withdraw 
iierself ; for the Lord shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of 
thy mourning shall be ended. 

But there is in this one respect an entire analogy be- 
tween the feeling of the artist and the feeling of the essay- 
ist : that to both, this world is to a certain extent trans- 
figured by the fact, that to each, things become compara- 
tively pleasing if they would please when described or 
depicted, though they might be unpleasing in fact. Not 
merely are those things good which are good in them- 
selves : those things are good which, though bad, will 
please and interest when represented. It is extremely 
certain, that there is a pleasure in writing about what 
there is no pleasure in bearing: and here is a happiness 
of the essayist. You are grossly cheated, my friend, by 



CONCLUSION. 441 

a man of most respectable character. You are worried 
by some glaring instance of tliat horrible dilatoriness, un 
faithfulness, and stupidity, which come across the success- 
ful issue of almost all human affairs. You are vexed, in 
short, at seeing how creakingly and jarringly and uneasi- 
ly the machine of life and society manages to blunder on. 
Well, you suffer ; and you have no relief But the es- 
sayist's painful feeling at such things is much mitigated 
when he thinks that here is a subject for him ; and when 
he goes and describes it. Once, it was to me unre- 
lieved and unalloyed pain to be cheated : or to listen to the 
vapouring of some silly person. Now, though still I can- 
not say I like it, still I dislike it less. I make a mental 
note. It will all go into an essay. One gets something 
of the spirit of the morbid anatomist, to whom some 
peculiar phase of disease is infinitely more interesting 
than commonplace health. Interesting wrong becomes 
(must I confess it?) a finer sight than uninteresting 
right. You know how country servants rejoice in 
coming to tell you that something is amiss : that a 
horse is lame, or a pig dying, or a field of potatoes 
blighted. It is something to tell about. Perhaps the 
essayist knows the peculiar emotion. 

I sometimes have thought that the writer of fiction is to 
be envied. He has another life and world than that we 
see. He has a duality of being. He sits down to his 
desk ; and in a little he is far away, and away in a 
world where he is absolute monarch. It has not been so 
with me. In writing these essays, I have not been rapt 
away into heroic times and distant scenes, and into 
romantic tracts of feeling. I have been writing amid 
daily work and worry, of daily work and worry ; and 
of the little things by which daily work and worry 



442 CONCLUSION. 

are intensified or relieved. I cannot pretend to long ex- 
perience of life ; nor perhaps to much. But from a 
quiet and lonely life, little varied and very happy, I 
have sent out these essays month by month ; and I hope 
to send out more. 



THE END. 



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12 A Li§l of Books Publilhed 



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Works lately Published. 

Faithful Forever. By Coventry Patmore, Author of 
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Over the Cliffs : A Novel. By Charlotte Chanter, 
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Sermons Preached in Harvard Chapel. By Rev. 

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The Complete^ Works of Walter Savage Landor. 

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